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In Prison My Whole Life (2007)
Director: Marc Evans
Movie review
From Time Out London
Mumia Abu-Jamal has been on Death Row for 27 years following a botched trial for the murder of a police officer. Sadly, ‘My Little Eye’ director Marc Evans’s doc is only tangentially about Jamal – instead, he chooses to focus on William Francome, a British journalist born on the day of Jamal’s incarceration, and his journey to discover the truth.He doesn’t get far. Francome is an uninteresting central figure, unconnected to the case or the history of civil rights, to which the pair present a sort of Idiot’s Guide midway through. But Evans keeps him front and centre throughout, whether interviewing luminaries like Angela Davis and Noam Chomsky or activist artists like Mos Def. This subjective approach subsumes the film’s powerful subject, making ‘In Prison My Whole Life’ just another self absorbed agit-prop documentary.
Author: Tom Huddleston
Time Out London Issue 1992: October 23-29, 2008
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