Our Friend Angela (Angela Davis) DVD

Our Friend Angela is a Soviet propaganda documentary chronicling the August–September 1972 visit of the American activist, academic, and Communist Party member Angela Davis to the Soviet Union. The film follows Davis — greeted as both a "sister" and a "friend" — as she travels from Moscow to Leningrad, Ulyanovsk, and the Uzbek cities of Tashkent and Samarkand, visiting factories, universities, schools, the Moscow Palace of Pioneers, and the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center at Star City. Throughout, she is accompanied by the cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, alongside fellow activists Kendra and Franklin Alexander.

Davis's visit came only weeks after her acquittal on 4 June 1972 on charges of murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy stemming from the 1970 Marin County Courthouse incident. Her arrival in Moscow in late August 1972 opened a six-week "gratitude tour" of socialist states — the Soviet Union, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Cuba, and Chile — organized in reciprocation for the international "Free Angela Davis" campaign that had made her a household name across the Eastern bloc. The CIA estimated in 1971 that some five percent of Soviet propaganda output was then directed toward Davis's cause.

The Soviet reception, scripted to the highest standards of red-carpet protocol, arguably exceeded the honors ordinarily reserved for heads of state. Davis received the Lenin Centenary Medal — reportedly the first presented to a foreigner by the Young Communist League — as well as honorary doctorates from Moscow State University and Tashkent State University. The award ceremony at the Supreme Soviet was presided over by Yadgar Nasriddinova, chair of the Soviet of Nationalities.

The documentary is at once a travelogue and a work of state-sponsored mythmaking. Davis is presented as a living refutation of American racism: the film pointedly contrasts her hometown of Birmingham, Alabama — nicknamed "Bombingham" for its record of racially motivated bombings — with a Soviet society depicted as having eradicated racial prejudice. Davis's own addresses to Soviet workers, students, and children, delivered in English and synchronized in the print, frame the visit as a meeting of two "socialist" futures. Contemporary reporting noted, however, that her failure to speak on behalf of political prisoners in the host countries drew quiet criticism from Soviet and Eastern European dissidents.

For scholars of Cold War cultural exchange, Our Friend Angela sits within a longer tradition of Soviet filmmaking about African American visitors — including earlier coverage of Langston Hughes and Paul Robeson — and serves as a primary visual record of the propaganda choreography surrounding one of the most celebrated foreign figures of the Brezhnev era

USSR, 1972, B&W, 25 minutes. English Voice Over with English subtitles.

NTSC Region 0 encoding (Entire World)