ON THE SCREEN
IN May 1985 Philadelphia police acted on a warrant to arrest members of an AfricanAmerican group calling itself MOVE from a house on Osage Ave in West Philadelphia.
MOVE was a back-to-basics movement, calling for the rejection of technology and a return to more natural ways of living. Founded in the 1970s by Vincent Leapheart, who had renamed himself John Africa, the group was known for having guns and some members were involved in a shootout with police in 1977. Acting on evidence that the group had illegal weapons, hundreds of police were sent as backup for the arrests. But things went badly wrong. Shots were fired and an “entry bomb” was dropped on the house. A fire broke out and the order was given to “let the fire burn”, resulting in the death of 11 people in the house and the destruction of dozens of nearby homes of innocent residents. This enthralling documentary looks at what happened and why it went wrong.
In 1968 outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, thousands of protesters gathered for what was meant to be a peaceful protest against mostly the Vietnam War. Violence erupted, primarily because of heavy handed police tactics. Afterwards seven of the protest’s organisers were put on trial for conspiring to cause a riot. Inexplicably an eighth was also put on trial, Black Panther Bobby Seale (Yahya Abdul-mateen II), despite the fact he was nowhere near the riot. They were prosecuted under a law, created