FREE STATE OF JONES REDISCOVERS A FORGOTTEN PAST
During the American Civil War, a group of runaway slaves and antislavery Whites in the vicinity of Jones County, Mississippi, decide to fight the local Confederate Army and are able to achieve a small victory. When they ask for assistance from the Union Army, they are turned down in 1864 because the strategy of the war was to head for the heart of the Confederacy to end the war. As a result, one day Confederate deserter Newton Knight (played by Matthew McConaughey) reads a statement declaring the area thus liberated as the Free State of Jones, one of four such renegade regions during the Civil War. But the film would be short if the story stopped there. Titles trace major events from the end of the Civil War, the period of Black Codes, the Reconstruction era, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, and the end of Reconstruction, indicating that the union was preserved but the former slaves were not really liberated for very long. Director Gary Ross devotes two hours and nineteen minutes to recount the history, a tale that could have been edited to be more exciting, but the imperatives of dramatizing a true story are followed instead, and the Political Film Society has nominated Free State of Jones for best film exposé of 2016. MH