ATTICA

Featuring: Clarence B. Jones, Lawrence Akil Killebrew, Alhajji Sharif, Al Victory, George Che Nieves, David Brosig and John Johnson.
Writer: Stanley Nelson
Directors: Traci Curry and Stanley Nelson

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★

In upstate New York in 1971, the entire population of Attica Prison took control of the facility and held prison employees hostage, to protest the cruel, inhumane treatment they were receiving at the hands of a brutal penal system. The vast majority of prisoners were black or brown; all the correctional officers and administration were white. After five days of non-violent negotiation, Governor Nelson Rockefeller, with President Nixon’s blessing, ordered armed police battalions and sniper units to take back Attica Prison; of the 43 men who died, 33 were inmates, while 10 were correctional officers and prison employees.

In director Stanley Nelson’s retrospective analysis of the event, it becomes very clear race and politics were the underlying concerns of those in charge of solving the Attica Prison stand-off. 50 years of memories and muted facts are revisited in interviews with prisoners who survived the killings; the personalities of the incarcerated but educated men who tried to attain basic human rights for the prison population, only to be slain where the stood, are remembered. And the finger of blame for the murder of 43 men is pointed squarely at those in power, who unleashed a tired, angry, well-armed mob upon a courtyard of defenseless men.

The stories and images are shocking and violent. Nelson and co-director Traci Curry refuse to skimp on detail, be it in the lead-up to the prison uprising, the chronology of events over the five day shut-in, or the horrendous slaughter that brought the revolution to an end. Oscar-nominated for Best Documentary Feature, Attica further exposes the insidious racial underpinnings of American society and the true worth that politicians, then and now, place on the value of black and brown lives.