THE JOURNEY OF LESRA MARTIN
Directed by Cheryl Foggo
Free public screening & discussion
February 4, 7 pm
Stanley A Milner Library Theatre
*** (out of five)

Whatever happened to that kid from Brooklyn who helped free the "Hurricane" from prison? The Journey of Lesra Martin, a documentary by Canadian writer/director Cheryl Foggo, follows that boy from his early life in the ghetto, to his life in Canada, to his return to Brooklyn for his brother’s funeral.

Martin’s life has been a mix of luck and hard work. He was born in a New York ghetto and seemed on the road to a life of gangs when three Canadians took a shine to him and decided to bring him back to Toronto. Shortly afterwards, Martin began writing letters to a boxer who had been in prison for nearly 20 years, Rubin "Hurricane" Carter. Carter was wrongly convicted of murder and with the help of Martin and the Canadians, got the case reopened and had his name cleared. The film’s greatest flaw, however, is that it assumes a more than basic knowledge of Carter’s story and what initially brought Martin into the public view. It never goes into the details of that rather significant time in the young man’s life, leaving those who haven’t seen the movie or read Carter’s biography struggling for a foothold in a story that otherwise seems empty of real jeopardy.

In fact, the documentary seems to have almost no teeth at all, bordering on patronizing when dealing with Martin’s early family life. There’s no real sense of the struggles Martin must have gone through to become a lawyer and make a life, and there’s only a cursory mention of the overwhelming scarcity of African people and rampant racism in many parts of Canada.

It also seems desperate to paint Martin himself as a man of the people, able to jump out of his upper middle class life and deposit himself into the alien world of his childhood on a whim. Going home is always a bizarre experience but that doesn’t really come across either.

So Lesra Martin lived happily ever after. The end.