Review of 'The Trial of the Chicago Seven'

Nice political film about the trial that resulted from the demonstrations outside the Democratic National Convention in 1968 in Chicago. Although it's mainly a courtroom drama there's lots of footage of the events in Chicago themselves - some real footage and some re-staged. Some of that - especially the 'police riot' - is hard to watch, because it's very violent, and there's a particularly nasty assault by counter-protestors on a woman demonstrator. 

Nice to see British actors playing Americans for a change, and to see Sacha Baron Cohen in a quite serious role. The accents seemed to me to slip once or twice, but not seriously, and it didn't spoil the film. Mark Rylance is especially good as the defense lawyer. 

It made me want to go and read Bobby Seale's book "Seize the Time", which has sat unread on my shelf for forty years; and also to re-read David Zane Mairowitz's "The Radical Soap Opera", and to listen to this podcast.

Some take-aways for me, having spent some of the last two years on the periphery of the XR street protest movement, is how little our side actually learns from the past. The demonstators mainly set out to be non-violent, but it didn't seem to me that they had much of a plan for what would happen when the other side, the Police and the National Guard, turned violent. 

They got some good sympathetic coverage from the TV networks (rather better than protestors get now, I'd say), but it was a miracle no-one was killed; what's more, it does seem that despite the coverage they didn't win people over to their side. They chanted "The Whole World is Watching", which was true, but the world saw what it wanted to see and turned out to have a short attention span.

Watched on Netflix.