Movies: The Gospel According to Tigre

IT’S A SATURDAY afternoon in February, and Hill has agreed to speak at the Evelyn Sanders Townhouses for low-income single mothers in North Philly. Kids are being honored for essays about Robert Purvis, a biracial abolitionist of the 1800s. Daily News cartoonist Signe Wilkinson, who’s a member of the mostly Quaker group sponsoring the contest, introduces Hill to the room, saying tactfully that he is “working on a film about justice and Mumia Abu-Jamal.” Then, turning to Tigre: “That should be out … in the next 20 years or so?”

Wilkinson in 1995 drew a cartoon lampooning how Abu-Jamal’s reputation improves as distance from the crime increases. At Philly City Hall: “Mumia Abu-Jamal is guilty.” In Hollywood: “Mumia is [a] role model.” In Europe: “Saint Mumia.” Hill’s putting it in his film.

He tells the children to read and think for themselves. “It’s so easy to follow what everyone else does,” he says. “It’s a lot harder to stand up and take a different position and fight for what’s right.” Who is it that he’s talking about, again?

The Mumia case is a little like global warming — passions have split along predictable political lines. We know Daniel Faulkner was shot and killed early on the morning of December 9, 1981, after pulling over Mumia’s brother, William Cook, near 13th and Locust. Abu-Jamal, born Wesley Cook, was shot at the scene and had a gun. He’s never given his version of events or why he was there. He was found guilty of murder six months later and has been on death row since.

WILKINSON’S CARTOON IS right: The Free Mumia movement is a cause célèbre outside of Philly. Two pro-Mumia documentaries from England make the case that the murder trial was tainted by coerced witnesses, inadequate forensics, a disputed confession. One of the films, A Case for Reasonable Doubt?, has witnesses saying a third man ran from the scene after the gunshots.

Hill was drinking at the Pen & Pencil Club in 2006 when Mike Strug, then a reporter at Channel 10, introduced him to Bill Colarulo, who’d been a rookie cop on the night of the shooting and told Hill a “riveting” account of the scene at Jefferson hospital. The elements of a new Tigre Hill film seemed to be converging: drama, violence, a chance to go this way when he was supposed to go that way. After seeing how the black community rallied around Mayor Street without necessarily exploring the facts, “I was skeptical of people who were saying Mumia was innocent,” Hill says.