Knowing nothing about Martin Luther King Jnr. other than the basics (black icon, assassination), I watched ‘Selma’ with a mixture of admiration at what people can achieve through a collective will, and some sadness that only last year, some fifty years after these events, that America still has such huge racial problems.
MLK (David Oyelowo) and the SCLC are looking for a town that is ready to march in protest at the US government refusing to grant black Americans the right to vote. They choose the town of Selma, where an ugly, brutal putdown of a peaceful demonstration takes place, shocking the American nation into revolutionary action.
Ava DuVernay directs this wonderfully moving account of those mid-60’s times. Each actor invests their character with humanity, often with only a few lines of dialogue, and Oyelowo is grand as the stoic, immovable lead (a Brit playing a historic American, again). A film about the human spirit
