Spring 1961, Alabama, USA. "The Ku Klux Klan shot the tires to stop the bus, smashed the windows to throw Molotov cocktails, and blocked the doors from the outside so that everyone would perish in the flames," recalls historian Bob Zellner. On the bus are the Freedom Riders, black and white college students campaigning for civil rights. Leaving from Washington, they plan to arrive in New Orleans and travel through the segregationist South, which continues to enforce Jim Crow laws, despite a Supreme Court ruling that made segregation on public transport illegal. . Bob Zellner lost partial use of one of his eyes in the battle.
This dense and fascinating documentary tells the story of black and Jewish figures who came together to fight against racism and anti-Semitism, "two sides of the same coin", said W.E.B. DuBois ( 1868-1963), sociologist and the first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard.
"Prick up your ears"
"Massacres and lynchings targeting black people were unbearable for Jewish people, who came from places where they had previously experienced oppression and discrimination," said Susan Neiman, director of the Einstein Forum. "When you hear bad things about the Jews, prick up your ears, we're talking about you," said Frantz Fanon, author of Black Skin, White Masks, in 1952 (Seuil, 2015).
The story told to us begins with the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909 and ends with the obtaining of civil rights and the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968. film, David Rybojad was interested in Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the black Baptist pastor's wrestling brother. "We left statistics, great dynamics to tell interpersonal relationships, explains the director. We talk too little about friendship, even though it is a real driving force. »
So Booker T. Washington and Julius Rosenwald, who founded a network of schools for black children in the south of the country. From the Jewish father of American anthropology Franz Boas and his black student and filmmaker Zora Neale Hurston, who deconstructed racial theories. Or Strange Fruit, a poem by Abel Meeropol sung by Billie Holiday at the legendary jazz club Café Society – one of the few places in New York that defied segregation.
Without idealizing the sometimes fratricidal relations between the two communities in the United States, the directors weave a story as much as a map of emancipation. "Making this film is also about us, French people, and what we could do together", wants to believe the director Rokhaya Diallo, whose feminist and anti-racist commitments are well established.
