Mother and son go in the car. It is August 1955, in Chicago. She, behind the wheel, smiles as she hums the song on the radio with him. Suddenly, the joy of the mother turns into a gesture of horror. A tragic thought has arisen.
Both are African-American, middle class, educated, elegant, happy, despite the indifference of the department store clerks.
This is how the film Till begins, premiered this Saturday at the New York Film Festival, a film that acts as a great cinematographic chronicle of the beginning of the fight for civil rights in the United States.
This edition, number 60, inaugurated on Friday with White Noise by Noah Baumbach, has a double Catalan presence. Pacifiction, by Albert Serra, will be screened next Wednesday, and Alcarràs will arrive the following day, a moment that will mark the beginning of Carla Simón's career towards the Oscars.
The second day of the contest was marked by Till's footprint, whose title alludes to the real case of Emmett Till, who died that same August in Money (Mississippi), at the age of 14. He had gone on vacation to a cousin's house. He was kidnapped and lynched for talking and whistling at a white woman, Carolyn. She was the wife of the grocery store owner, Roy Bryant, where she had gone to buy candy. Her mother, Mamie Till Mobley (Danielle Deadwyler), already warned her, "Be humble and careful with white people." This wasn't like Chicago.
"What we see is the culmination of everything we live now," says Whoopi Goldberg (the grandmother), one of the performers and producer, at the press conference after the screening. "We have to be careful that we don't come back to this situation again, I think it's imperative that we all say we don't want to do this again," she adds.
In this present of alternative realities, in which conspiracies are given more value than facts, the film directed by Chinonye Chukwu records the historical relevance of the Till affair, about which books have been written, documentaries made and even Bob Dylan dedicated a song to him.
But Chukwu focuses on the mother, on the courage and relevance that this woman had in defending her son's memory and turning it into a milestone that opened the door to so many things.
Her son's case could have been one more case of a executed black man, if it weren't for the fact that she made the decision to open the coffin and show the brutality they committed against him. She embraced activism by certifying that systemic hatred and racism polluted institutions. In a bogus trial, Roy Bryant and his stepbrother, J.W. Milam, they were acquitted. Less than a year later, when they could not stand trial again, they admitted to Look magazine (in exchange for $4,000) that they killed Till. Justice recently refused to prosecute Carolyn, who is still alive, for lying to incite the crime.
“Mamie is the heart of this story. Black women are often erased from history and I wanted to put her at the center, humanize her and show her in her multidimension”, explains the director. Another relevant element of her work is that she avoids the violence of the lynching to delve into the consequences.
The anti-lynching law was passed in the United States last March, 67 years after the fatal torture of Emmett Till, after which the legislation is named.
