Citizen King

The footage may be 40 years old, but the charisma of Nobel Peace Prize winner Martin Luther King still bursts from the screen. In , Orlando Bagwell and Noland Walker not only capture King the man, but also the significance of his work to the human rights movement. Concentrating on the last five years of his life and incorporating archive footage and interviews with historians, staff members, family, friends and witnesses, they take stock of a life dominated by an ideal. The images are accompanied by solemn black spirituals, which were a source of inspiration for King. Apart from the historic successes, the film pays attention to the dilemmas and growing radicalization of the Black Power movement in the cities, which King, coming from a rural town in the South, struggled with more and more. leads the viewer from the Birmingham campaign in the spring of 1963, the famous march on Washington, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the abolition of segregation and the introduction of the blacks' right to vote, the infamous riots in Los Angeles, and the protests against the Vietnam War all the way to that fatal morning in Memphis in the spring of 1968, when the 39-year-old King was murdered upon leaving his hotel.