Daniel Kaluuya has already won fifteen awards for his portrayal of Fred Hampton in Judas and the black messiah. These include the Golden Globe and the Prize of the Actors’ Union (Sag). It will probably also win the Academy Award. Even though these are all awards for Best Supporting Actor, there is no doubt that at the center of Shaka King’s important film is Hampton, vice president of the Black Panthers killed during a police raid on the house where he lived, on December 4 of 2010. 1969.
In Shaka King’s film, the title Judas, FBI informant Bill O’Neal (played by Lakeith Stanfield), is a tool to approach Hampton sideways and grasp his political greatness and human depth without having to identify with. emotionally with the character and thus leaving space for all possible reflections. Stanfield is also nominated for an Academy Award and curiously also as a supporting actor.
But in the end, that’s right. Nobody imposes their story on the viewer. If anything, it is history itself that imposes itself. And at the moment Judas and the black messiah becomes the spearhead of a whole cinematography black who is rewriting entire chapters of the great book of the United States, adding a point of view that one cannot and must no longer ignore, a truth that one can no longer pretend not to understand.
Judas and the black messiah
By Shaka King. With Daniel Kaluuya, Lakeith Stanfield, Dominique Fishback, Jesse Plemons, Martin Sheen. United States 2021, 126 ‘. For rent.
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