Review: Till

Till tells the true story of the teenager whose brutal murder in 1955 helped galvanise the Civil Rights movement in the Deep South of the USA. Featuring the Bafta-nominated performance of Danielle Deadwyler as Emmett Till's mother Mamie. Streaming on Prime Video.Emmet Till was one of the most significant figures in the American Civil Rights movement, though outside the United States his name may not be as well-known as it should be. His story has been the subject of several documentaries, but as far as I know Till is the first feature film dramatisation. It's currently streaming on Prime Video.Emmett Till was a 14-year-old kid in 1955. His family had moved out of rural Mississippi and settled in Chicago, where Mamie Till found a good job and a nice house. One day Emmett - nicknamed Bo by the family - is invited down South for a couple of weeks to meet his cousins.Mamie has severe doubts. Bo only knows life in the gregarious big city, he has no idea what life is like in hard-core racist Mississippi. She tries to tell him, but he's a kid, he doesn't listen. He's on holiday.Emmett Till was a friendly, jokey kind of kid. So, when he buys some candy at a shop, it never occurs to him not to joke with the hard-faced white woman behind the counter. But his cousins know. Get in the car, they scream. She's got a gun. Her name is Carolyn Bryant.And that's one thing a movie can do - show you precisely how something like this can happen.There's a knock at the door that night, Bo is taken and that's the last his family see him alive. But that's by no means the end of the story. There's a lot more to come.Till was directed by Nigerian-born Chinonye Chukwu, and written by Emmett Till scholar Keith Beauchamp.What grabs you is how closely it seems to stick to the well-documented facts. This is a story that needs no dramatic help at all. And what happened next made history.When Emmett Till's body was returned to his mother, it was almost unrecognizable. And out of her icy rage at what had happened to her son, Mamie Till made the decision that Emmett be shown in an open coffin. And she demanded that everyone look.It was that - and the famous photograph of the event - that forced the lynching of Emmett Till off the "typical Southern crime" pages of the country's newspapers and onto the front page.This was one of the first headline-grabbing moments of the late Fifties that finally put Civil Rights on the political agenda, a hundred years after the Civil War…Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details