In the cinema: “Ibn al-Janoub” about the white comrade in arms – Culture

A brilliant career awaits the young man from the southern states, who entered All White College in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1961. He has good grades, he can choose mainly the university: Harvard, and perhaps also Princeton. The world is open to people like him, because he has three useful properties of time and space that his roommate lists when he visits a bar: He is “free, white, and of legal age.” And that’s in a separate world where the black population is systematically discriminated against.

But things started moving a long time ago. Six years ago, Rosa Parks, also in Montgomery, refused to give her bus seat to a white passenger. In the context of the later “Busboykotts von Montgomery” At least this aspect of the racial legislation was overturned by the black population—a huge success for the nascent civil rights movement.

With that in mind, “Son of the South” by Barry Alexander Brown tells the true story of Bob Zellner (Lucas Till), one of the early white activists in the civil rights movement. It starts with being a college student doing a research paper on interracial relations so obviously meeting members of the black community. Bob meets civil rights activist Ralph Abernathy and Rosa Parks, and attends mass and dinner at the church. Even if the Ku Klux Klan planted a burning cross in front of the dorm window and walked down the street in front of the college. Grandfather under cover.

It didn’t take long before Bob witnessed white mobs attacking a group of peaceful and nonviolent protesters at a demonstration. As a result, it became more and more. Eventually he gave up his studies and career and became secretary of the Black Student Organization. A white man from the South falls in love with a black lecturer and marches for civil rights activists – his old friends are trying to kill him. But Zellner’s courage is only a magnifying glass of the courage of those affected: as a white man, he makes a free decision, while blacks have no choice but to risk their lives on the streets if something is to change for them.

Brown’s film may chronicle Zellner’s life, but the film’s true hero is the Civil Rights Movement, with its historical figures, demonstrations, and victims. The executive producer is, after all, Spike Lee, who continues to talk in his films about the lives of black Americans and their struggle against racism. Directed by Lee’s film editor Brown, Son of the South adds a notable but not central figure to the history of the civil rights movement. Zellner is not a legend, not a hero, but a decent and discreet man who does the right thing. At most, an old retro man like Clint Eastwood could have turned the white boy into the first silent American hero.

Everything in this tutorial movie has to “show” something

Dem bescheidenen Gestus des Films entspricht, dass die Spielszenen mit Zellner eher das zahlreich eingespielte historische Archivmaterial verlebendigen, während seine Figur als Anschauungsmaterial zur heute vieldiskutierten Frage dienen mag, wie ein Weißer denn nun ein guter “Ally”, ein Mitstreiter und Verbündeter für Minderheiten werden Could you. Flashbacks and fading often make the characters’ pasts very vivid, baboons appear behind window panes, and memories run through door frames that have been turned into screens.

Everything in this tutorial has to “show” something, even the decor. The curriculum involves learning and not learning about racism: from the ingrained hatred of the KKK’s grandfather to the “color blindness” of the father, who wandered with a black gospel choir through the Soviet Union and then “lost to the clan,” to Zellner’s. Transformation into a good ally. At the end of the day, he doesn’t want to be seen as a “white savior” in the media, and as a white man who doesn’t want to steal the show from black activists.

However, there is an element that gives the school film gesture a concrete historical and geographical reality. that it Southern accentJulia Ormond, as white civil rights activist Virginia Dor, is trying hard to get her. The elongated, flattering nose of this language automatically transforms everything that is said into a solid point of view, or sermon, whether it is about the racism of the white population or the struggle for justice. Both sides are in it. All you have to do is pick the one Bob Zellner picked.

son of the south2020 – Directed and written by Barry Alexander Brown. Camera: John Rosario. With Lucas Till, Jim Klok, and Michael Cero. Bush Media, 105 min.