First trailer revealed for Judas and the Black Messiah
There’s a literal explosion and a game of cat-and-mouse between a revolutionary figure and the FBI plot to take him down. And it’s also a true story.
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At 21 years old, Chairman Fred Hampton was making waves as the head of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther party.
At 21 years old, he was assassinated by the FBI
In 1969, a dawn raid busted into the room where Hampton was sleeping. When it was over, he was dead, his mattress was covered in blood and the wall behind him sprayed with bullets.
The real-life revolutionary figure is the focus of a new film, Judas and the Black Messiah, starring Oscar-nominated Get Out star Daniel Kaluuya as Hampton with co-stars including Lakeith Stanfield, Jesse Plemons, Dominique Fishback, Ashton Sanders, Lil Rel Howery and Martin Sheen.
The first trailer was revealed today and it is intense and explosive – as in, there’s a literal explosion on screen.
It was directed by Shaka King from a script by King and Will Berson, and produced by Ryan Coogler (Black Panther, Creed) and Charles D. King (Sorry to Bother You, Just Mercy).
Judas and the Black Messiah will chart the tumultuous events that led up to Hampton’s (Kaluuya) killing and the role of William O’Neal (Stanfield), a young black man the FBI recruited to infiltrate the Black Panther party in exchange for dropping criminal charges against him.
In a virtual panel ahead of the trailer reveal earlier today, Coogler said that while he had grown up in an area of the San Francisco Bay Area where the history of Black Panthers was well known but he had a “sense of shame” of how old he was before he learnt about the contributions of Hampton to the movement against “exploitation, colonisation and capitalism”.
“Everything you hear about Chairman Fred Hampton was he was a unique person – the stories are almost unbelievable when you think about how much he did by the time he was 21 years old, how he was assassinated, what people’s reactions were, the things he said. You could take something he said in the sixties and it would still be relevant today.
“There aren’t many Chairman Fred Hamptons, but William O’Neal, you meet a lot of William O’Neals every day.”
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The battle of wits between the FBI and their infiltrator, and the movement and Hampton is set up in the title, while King, the director, placed the film within the undercover crime thriller genre, referencing the likes of The Departed.
King spoke about how he and his collaborators wanted the movie to depict a different side of the Black Panther party, a revolutionary socialist organisation which many believe has been the victim of misinformation campaigns throughout history, including those conducted by the FBI.
King said: “We approached it early on for it to be a counterpropaganda piece. We always had that in mind. What are we saying about these individuals?”
King said it was important for the filmmakers to have on set Hampton’s son, Chairman Fred Hampton Jr, whose mother was nine months pregnant with him at the time of Hampton’s death.
“It was key to have him there and to have a lot of difficult conversations,” King said.
“There were many instances in which we could’ve stepped into quicksand if he wasn’t there – things that we might not have thought were big deals in terms of changing history but would’ve been incredibly offensive to former party members and supporters, it was a blessing.”
Even though Judas and the Black Messiah is set in the 1960s, its relevance and urgency to today’s Black Lives Matter movement is not lost on those involved.
“This isn’t some abstract, disconnected discussion because the reality is there are still people locked up with pending cases and people in political exile,” Hampton Jr. said. “I don’t want to give the impression that it was just in the 1960s, this stuff is still happening.
“People’s political pores are now open, there are certain things people can relate to right now. It’s what they say, ‘it takes people 20 years to learn in ordinary times what you can learn in two years in revolutionary times’. It’s that time again.”
Judas and the Black Messiah is coming to cinemas soon.
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Originally published as First trailer revealed for Judas and the Black Messiah