Jornal da Mostra
26 de março de 2002
BEST DOCUMENTARY OSCAR WAS ALSO POLITICALLY CORRECT
Nobody paid much attention to the best feature-length documentary award for "Murder on a Sunday Morning". The American film, by the French directors Jean-Xavier de Lestrade and Denis Poncet, was produced for HBO and it has been announced to be shown on TV this Sunday at 10h30 PM on the pay-TV network in the United States. For this Oscar also lent itself to promoting a correction in the ways of the Hollywood Academy, a kind of mea culpa in its historical revision, facing racial matters and the black people`s part in the political and artistic formation of the country.
It was certainly a political award turned to the America social intern matter after the tragedies started by the September 11 2001 attacks. So much that it deferred the favorite for best documentary, with a theme that is sympathetic to the members of the Academy, the Jewish question, "Promises", by Justine Shapiro, B.Z. Goldberg and Carlos Bolado.
The rich beach resort Jacksonville, in Florida, is focused by the racism in the police system denounce documentary. Jean-Xavier de Lestrade cited Martin Luther King Jr.`s speech about an America where children will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Lestrade concluded his thought by saying "Thirty-eight years later we film the story about a teenager who had been stopped, arrested and sent to jail because he was just a black kid walking in the street near a crime scene."
This documentary opens a serious debate about the existing prejudices in the conduction of investigations of crimes with suspicions that always fall first on black people and members of poorer ethnical communities. The documentary follows two Duval County public defenders as they prepare their defense of 16-year-old black high school student Brenton Butler, arrested after being identified as the murderer of Mary Ann Stephens, a 65-year-old tourist from Georgia, who was shot in the face before her husband`s eyes on May 7, 2000 outside a motel room in Jacksonville, where the couple was spending holidays.
Examining the Butler case from trial preparations to the dramatic verdict to the surprising aftermath a year later, "Murder on a Sunday Morning" shows how racial bias and careless police investigation can turn an innocent person into the prime suspect in a brutal murder. Promotional material of the film on the HBO page in the internet is rather radical in its judging about the case and ask to see "how the wheels of justice turn in America, as well as how incompetent police work can corrupt the legal system."
And one article on the Jacksonville newspaper yesterday reminds us that the boy confessed to police, but the confession was beaten out of him, and two sheriffs in town took the extraordinary step of apologizing to Butler and his family, and arrested two other men for the slaying. Jacksonville`s paper clarifies that it wasn`t by chance that the also black actor Samuel L. Jackson was invited to announce the winner of the best documentary award. He was recently in Jacksonville with John Travolta for the shootings of "Basic", when he got acquainted with the dramatic trail case of the innocent boy.
