The unexpected highlight of Thursday evening was the documentary In Prison My Whole Life, premiering on Leicester Square.

The documentary tells the story of Mumia Abu-Jamal who was found guilty of murdering a police officer in 1981 in Philadelphia and has been waiting on death row since then. The framing device of the film, which argues Abu-Jamal’s innocence, is that the narrator, William Francome, was born on the day that Abu-Jamal was arrested- hence he has literally been in prison for the entirety of Francome’s life.

The film goes into great detail about the civil rights background of Philadelphia, including the siege on the Move group, and features interviews about the case with luminaries such as Linn Washington, Noam Chomsky, Angela Davis, Mos Def, and Snoop Dogg.

What is odd is that an awful lot of this background material is presented before it is explained why Abu-Jamal might be innocent. In many respects this was a TV movie transposed on the large screen, however, it clearly had a significant budget, paying for extensive visuals and cgi mock ups. Some of this money might have been garnered due to the odd fact that the English actor Colin Firth acted as an executive producer.

The film offers some extremely interesting insights into US society and the development of the Civil Rights movement in the last thirty years, and is essential viewing for an American audience.

My Kid Could Paint That followed on the documentary theme. In it Amir Bar Lev follows the life of a child art prodigy, who rose to fame in 2004 and was compared to Kandinsky, Picasso, and Pollack, before being shot down amidst accusations that her father had directed her painting.

If anyone had earlier missed anything, the day also featured a host of re-screenings to allow Londoners to catch up. Sicko, Unrelated, Things We Lost In The Fire and City Of Men all went for another round.