Looking for life affirming movies to watch? Here are a few.
Ali (On Netflix), directed by Michael Mann is long and meandering but it has important things to say about race, power and how one man with the intention to not comply can challenge the majoritarian narrative about patriotism. Especially when the notion of patriotism includes the oppression of the minorities.
The most important point this bio-pic of Mohammad Ali makes is that no war we as a nation fight with other countries can be as devastating as the one we fight everyday against each other to oppress those weaker than us. And to snuff out their stories and contrarian perspectives of pain and persecution.
Mohammad Ali openly challenged racism, refused to be drafted in the American army during the Vietnam war and had the courage to own his muslim identity, his dissent and his skin colour at a time when it was unsafe and unpopular to do so.
That he survived and thrived gives one hope.
Race, Stephen Hopkins’ brilliantly titled film about Jesse Owens is much more cohesive.
It demonstrates the futility of claiming racial or genetic supremacy because as the 1936 Berlin Olympics demonstrated, all it took was one human-being with an undeniable gift to destroy the Nazi empire’s Aryan delusions.
Owens, a black man won four gold medals in the face of majoritarian propaganda to mock not just Hitler but the racists in his own country who continued to look down upon him even after he had become a legend.
This is an important film to watch in these times when there is so much indoctrination going on to humiliate the minorities.
The most important line comes from a German athlete who tells Jesse, “I love my country but my government is going insane and they are not ashamed of it either.”
The film also makes one realise that be it a sporting event or a global pandemic in today’s context, propaganda can never replace truth and facts.
Like Ali and Race, Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam C. J. Walker (also on Netflix), is also about race and aspiration. Only here, the dreamer is an erstwhile washer woman who builds a beauty empire out of all the pain and humiliation she has suffered. This is not a perfectly narrated story. It pits one woman against another in a horrendous reimagining of a boxing match but it gets one thing absolutely right. The acknowledgment of stories and experiences that are usually erased in mono cultures. How do the marginalised feel when their bodies, their humanity, their skin are made invisible?
And the miracles that can unfold when one individual refuses to chain the dreamer within and rewrites her own story. And becomes undeniably visible to not just serve history but to make it.