Amistad is a 1997 American historical drama film directed by Steven Spielberg, based on the true

story of the 1839 mutiny aboard the slave ship La Amistad, during which Mende tribesmen abducted
for the slave trade managed to gain control of their captors' ship off the coast of Cuba, and the
international legal battle that followed their capture by a U.S. revenue cutter. The case was
ultimately resolved by the Supreme Court in 1841.
Morgan Freeman, Nigel Hawthorne, Anthony Hopkins, Djimon Hounsou, and Matthew
McConaughey had starring roles. David Franzoni's screenplay was based on the book Mutiny on the
Amistad: The Saga of a Slave Revolt and Its Impact on American Abolition, Law, and
Diplomacy (1987), by the historian Howard Jones.

Contents
[hide]

1Plot
2Cast
3Production
o 3.1Music
4Historical accuracy
5Reception
o 5.1Critical response
o 5.2Box office
o 5.3Awards and honors
6See also
7References
8External links

Plot[edit]
Amistad is the name of a slave ship traveling from Cuba to the United States in 1839. It is carrying
African people as its cargo. As the ship is crossing from Cuba to the United States, Cinqu, a leader
of the Africans, leads a mutiny and takes over the ship. The mutineers spare the lives of two Spanish
navigators to help them sail the ship back to Africa. Instead, the navigators play out the Africans and
sail north to the east coast of the United States, where the ship is stopped by the American Navy,
and the 53 living Africans imprisoned as runaway slaves.
In an unfamiliar country and not speaking a single word of English, the Africans find themselves in a
legal battle. District Attorney William S. Holabird brings charges of piracy and murder. The Secretary
of State John Forsyth, on behalf of President Martin Van Buren (who is campaigning for re-election),
represents the claim of Queen Isabella II of Spain that the Africans are slaves and are property of
Spain based on a treaty. Two Naval officers claim them as salvage while the two Spanish navigators
produce proof of purchase. A lawyer named Roger Sherman Baldwin, hired by the abolitionist
Tappan and his black associate Joadson (a fictional character[1]) decides to defend the Africans.
Baldwin argues that the Africans had been captured in Africa to be sold in the Americas illegally.
Baldwin proves through documents found hidden on Amistad that the African people were initially
cargo belonging to a Portuguese slave ship, The Tecora. Therefore, the Africans were free citizens
of another country and not slaves at all. In light of this evidence, the staff of President Van Buren has
the judge presiding over the case replaced by Judge Coglin, who is younger and believed to be
impressionable and easily influenced. Consequently, seeking to make the case more personal, on
the advice of former American president (and lawyer) John Quincy Adams, Baldwin and Joadson
find James Covey, a former slave who speaks both Mende and English. Cinque tells his story at trial.
District Attorney Holabird attacks Cinqus tale of being captured and kept in a Lomboko slave
fortress and especially questions the throwing of precious cargo overboard. However, the Royal
Navy's fervent abolitionist Captain Fitzgerald of the West Africa Squadron backs up Cinqus
account. Baldwin shows from The Tecora's inventory that the number of African people taken as
slaves was reduced by 50. Fitzgerald explains that some slave ships when interdicted do this to get
rid of the evidence for their crime. But in The Tecora's case, they had underestimated the amount of
provisions necessary for their journey. As the tension rises, Cinqu stands up from his seat and
repeatedly cries, "Give us, us free!"
Judge Coglin rules in favor of the Africans. After pressure from Senator Calhoun on President Van
Buren, the case is appealed to the Supreme Court. Despite refusing to help when the case was
initially presented, Adams agrees to assist with the case. At the Supreme Court, he makes an
impassioned and eloquent plea for their release, and is successful.
The Lomboko slave fortress is liberated by the Royal Marines under the command of Captain
Fitzgerald. After all the slaves were hurried out of the fortress, Fitzgerald orders the ship's cannon to
destroy it. He then dictates a letter to Forsyth saying that he was rightthe slave fortress doesn't
exist.
Because of the release of the Africans, Van Buren loses his re-election campaign, and tension builds
between the North and the South, which would eventually culminate in the Civil War.

Cast[edit]
Morgan Freeman as Theodore Joadson
Nigel Hawthorne as President Martin Van Buren
Anthony Hopkins as John Quincy Adams
Djimon Hounsou as Sengbe Pieh / Joseph Cinqu
Matthew McConaughey as Roger Sherman Baldwin
David Paymer as Secretary of State John Forsyth
Pete Postlethwaite as William S. Holabird
Stellan Skarsgrd as Lewis Tappan
Razaaq Adoti as Yamba
Abu Bakaar Fofanah as Fala
Anna Paquin as Queen Isabella II of Spain
Toms Milin as ngel Caldern de la Barca y Belgrano
Chiwetel Ejiofor as Ens. James Covey
Derrick Ashong as Buakei
Geno Silva as Jose Ruiz
John Ortiz as Pedro Montes
Kevin J. O'Connor as Missionary
Ralph Brown as Lieutenant Thomas R. Gedney
Darren E. Burrows as Lieutenant Richard W. Meade
Allan Rich as Judge Andrew T. Juttson
Paul Guilfoyle as Attorney
Peter Firth as Captain Fitzgerald
Xander Berkeley as Ledger Hammond
Jeremy Northam as Judge Coglin
Arliss Howard as John C. Calhoun
Austin Pendleton as Professor Josiah Willard Gibbs, Sr.
Pedro Armendriz Jr. as General Baldomero Espartero
Retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun also appears in the film as Justice Joseph
Story.

Production[edit]
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Actress and director Debbie Allen had run across some books about the mutiny on La Amistad and
brought the subject to HBO films, which chose to make a film adaptation of the subject. She later
presented the project to DreamWorks SKG to release the film, which agreed. Steven Spielberg, who
wanted to stretch his artistic wings after making The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), was
interested in directing it for DreamWorks, which he also co-founded, as well. Spielberg was an
unlikely person to tackle the Amistad story since his previous picture about black characters, The
Color Purple, had been badly received by the black community.
Filming of the exterior and interior court scenes took place at the Old Colony House in Newport, RI,
and then moved to Sonalyst Studios. The opening scene was filmed on a sound stage in Universal
Studios. Production then went to Puerto Rico for the scenes set in Africa, including those with the
slave fortress.
Post-production was done rarely with Spielberg, due to his commitment to another DreamWorks
film, Saving Private Ryan.
 The Peacemaker is a 1997 American action-political thriller film starring George Clooney and Nicole
Kidman and directed by Mimi Leder. It was the first film released by DreamWorks. While the story
takes place all over the world, it was shot primarily in the Republic of Macedonia, with some
sequences filmed in New York City, Philadelphia, and Bratislava.[2]

Contents
[hide]

1Plot
2Cast
3Release
4References
5External links

Plot[edit]
In an Eastern Orthodox church in Pale, Bosnia and Herzegovina, an unidentified man (later revealed
to be a Bosnian diplomat to the UN) is murdered after being paged to meet someone outside.
At a missile base in Russia, SS-18 ICBMs are being decommissioned. Ten nuclear warheads are
loaded onto a train and sent to a separate site for dismantling. However, Russian General Aleksandr
Kodoroff, along with a rogue tactical unit, kills the soldiers on board the transport train and transfers
nine of the warheads to another train. Kodoroff then activates the timer on the remaining warhead
and sends the transport on a collision course with a passenger train. Minutes later, the 500-kiloton
warhead detonates, killing the survivors and delaying an investigation.
The detonation immediately attracts the attention of the U.S. government. White House nuclear
expert Dr. Julia Kelly believes that Chechen terrorists are behind the incident. U.S. Army Special
Forces Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Devoe interrupts her briefing to suggest that the crash and
detonation were staged to hide the hijacking of the other warheads. A call to Devoe's long-time
friend and Russian counterpart, Dimitri Vertikoff, adds credence to his hypothesis and he is assigned
as Dr. Kelly's military liaison.
Kelly and Devoe try to track the terrorists through an Austrian trucking company which is a front for
the Russian Mafia. When the Mafia realizes they are U.S. government agents, they send thugs to kill
them. Vertikoff, attempting to pay them off, is killed. Devoe kills most of the would-be assassins, and
he and Kelly escape. Information from the trucking company shows that the nukes are bound for
Iran. Spy satellites place the truck in a traffic jam in Dagestan, and Devoe uses a ruse to identify it.
The satellite, tracking in real time, is able to verify its license plate.
Stopped at a checkpoint, Kodoroff and his men kill the guards. Devoe then leads a special forces
unit to stop them. Denied entry into Russian airspace, one of the helicopters is shot down by a
Russian surface-to-air missile battery, but the remaining helicopters are able to locate the truck
carrying the warheads. A gunfight ensues in which Kodoroff is killed and the warheads are seized.
Interrogation of the surviving member of the group reveals that one warhead was taken by another
man.
Further work on the information from the trucking company leads IFOR to a Sarajevo address. Inside
is a video cassette of a Yugoslav named Duan Gavri. Gavri disclaims any allegiance in
the Yugoslav Wars ("I am a Serb, a Croat, and a Muslim"), but blames other countries for supplying
weapons to all sides in the war. Dr. Kelly realizes he intends to bomb a meeting at the UN
headquarters in New York City and the city goes into lockdown. Gavri arrives in Manhattan with the
Bosnian diplomatic delegation. A flashback shows that Gavri wants to avenge the death of his wife
and daughter, who were killed in Sarajevo. He and his brother are finally found by the NYPD. When
his brother is killed by Devoe, a wounded Gavri is followed into a parochial school and then a
church. Devoe confronts Gavri, who commits suicide, knowing that the bomb is set to go off in a
matter of minutes and cannot be deactivated. With only seconds to spare, Dr. Kelly is able to remove
a part of the explosive lens shell of the bomb, preventing the primary explosion from
establishing critical mass within the plutonium core. The primary wrecks the church, but the warhead
itself does not detonate. Devoe and Kelly both survive with minor injuries.

Cast[edit]
George Clooney as Lt. Col. Thomas Devoe
Nicole Kidman as Dr. Julia Kelly
Marcel Iure as Duan Gavri
Aleksandr Baluev as Gen. Aleksandr Kodoroff
Rene Medveek as Vlado Miri
Randall Batinkoff as Ken
Holt McCallany as Mark Appleton
Armin Mueller-Stahl as Col. Dimitri Vertikoff
Goran Vinji as a Russian Sergeant
Michael Boatman as Lt. Beach
Carlos Gomez as Capt. Santiago
Sebastian Roch as German Backpacker
 Shining Through is an American World War II drama film which was released to United States
cinemas on January 31, 1992,[2] written and directed by David Seltzer and starring Michael
Douglas and Melanie Griffith, with Liam Neeson, Joely Richardson and John Gielgud in supporting
roles. It is based on the novel of the same name by Susan Isaacs. The original music score was
composed by Michael Kamen. The film's tagline is: "He needed to trust her with his secret. She had
to trust him with her life."

Contents
[hide]

1Plot
2Cast
3Production
4Reception
5References
6External links

Plot[edit]
In 1940, Linda Voss (Melanie Griffith), a young woman of Irish/German Jewish parentage, applies
for a new job as a secretary with a New York City law firm, but was rejected as she didn't graduate
from a prestigious women's college.
Because she can speak German fluently, she becomes translator to Ed Leland (Michael Douglas), a
humourless attorney, who is referred to as the "pallbearer" by his peers due to his lack of humor.
She gradually comes to suspect that he hides dark secrets. She is proven right when, after America
officially joins forces with the Allies, he emerges as a colonel in the OSS. She accompanies him to
confidential meetings in New York and Washington D.C., and before long, they become lovers.
When he is suddenly posted away, she is left alone and devastated. Assigned to work in the War
Department, Linda longs for and hears nothing of Ed until one evening as she sat on her own in a
local restaurant-bar he reappears as suddenly as he left with an attractive female officer. Reluctant
to resume their affair, he does re-employ her.
He and his colleagues abruptly need to replace a murdered agent in Berlin at very short notice.
Despite knowing little about intelligence work only what she's seen in movies Linda volunteers
and Ed allows himself to be persuaded by her fluent German and passion to contribute to the war
effort, not to mention her skills in reproducing German-based dishes, as proven by her banging on
his front door in the middle of the night and getting him to taste her "German Kompot". Her mission is
to bring back data on the V-1 flying bomb. They travel to Switzerland, where he hands her over to
master spy Konrad Friedrichs, codenamed "Sunflower" (John Gielgud). Despite being appalled at
her dialect ("the accent of a Berlin butcher's wife!"), he installs her in the basement of his Berlin
mansion and introduces her to his niece, Margrete von Eberstein (Joely Richardson), a socialite also
working as an Allied agent.
Linda is planted as a cook in the household of a social-climbing Nazi, but her first dinner is a disaster
and she is sacked on the spot. She is taken on as a nanny to the children of high-ranking Nazi
officer Franz-Otto Dietrich (Liam Neeson), who had been a guest at the dinner. Unable to report
back to Ed, she is taken to Dietrich's house and effectively drops out of sight. He brings home
confidential documents she was sent to find. While frantically searching for them - intending to
photograph them - she also locates her cousins, believed to be hiding in Berlin, through her contact
and reveals their location to Margrete.
With the children in her care, she tracks down her relatives' hiding place but is too late. They have
already been captured and the cellar is empty. As all hope is lost, air raid sirens blare in the city and
residents, including her and the children, run through the streets as buildings around them are blown
apart by the falling bombs.
The preceding attack causes the frightened children to reveal the existence of a hidden room, which
Linda finds and secretly photographs Dietrich's top-secret papers. When Dietrich invites her to the
opera the next evening, her cover is blown by Margrete's mother, who believes her to be a friend of
her daughter's from college. In desperation, she flees from the Dietrich home and seeks sanctuary
with Margrete, only to find to her horror that she is a double agent who has betrayed Linda's cousins
and has now also betrayed her. Margrete shoots her, wounding her, but she overpowers Margrete
and kills her. Though in pain, she manages to slip down the laundry chute, narrowly escaping the
German officers raiding Margrete's apartment.
Badly wounded, Linda is found and rescued by Ed, who has come to Berlin in the guise of a high-
ranking German officer. Pretending to be mute as a wounded war veteran, as he does not speak
German, he takes her to the railway station and they travel to the Swiss border with the German
Reich, shown in the movie to be at Alsttten SG. She is barely alive and his travel papers have not
been officially stamped and signed as revealed by the German border guard who declares to Leland
that his papers aren't in order, viz. "Diese Papiere sind nicht amtlich besttigt" and as an officer of
the SS Leland should have known this, viz. " ... als Offizier der SS mssen Sie das wissen". The
border guard then demands an explanation, viz. "Ich verlange eine Erklrung," whereupon Leland
then tries to bluff his way out of it by pointing to a wound on his neck and indicating that he cannot
speak. His bluff as a mute wounded officer fails to sway the border guards, however, forcing him to
shoot his way out. Still carrying her, he struggles towards the border. The German sniper guarding it
wounds him twice, but he manages to get himself and Linda across it before collapsing. The German
border guard is shot by his Swiss counterpart, an act which is justified by the fact that the German
border guard was still shooting at Leland after he had crossed into Switzerland.
The film closes with a continuation of the interview of an elderly Linda. It is revealed that while she
and Ed recovered from their injuries in a Swiss hospital, the microfilm of the secret German
documents has been retrieved from a hiding place inside her glove. She waves to him and their two
sons. He joins her on camera as the film ends.

Cast[edit]
Michael Douglas as Ed Leland Dana Gladstone as Street Agitator
Melanie Griffith as Linda Voss Lorrine Vozoff as Personnel Director
Liam Neeson as General Franz-Otto Dietrich Mathieu Carrire as Capt. Von Haefler
Joely Richardson as Margrete von Eberstein Deirdre Harrison as USO Singer
John Gielgud as Sunflower Wolf Kahler as Border Commandant
Francis Guinan as Andrew Berringer Wolfe Morris as Male Translator
Patrick Winczewski as Fishmonger William Hope as Kernohan
Anthony Walters as Dietrich's Son Nigel Whitmey as 1st G.I. in Canteen
Victoria Shalet as Dietrich's Daughter Rob Freeman as 2nd G.I. in Canteen
Sheila Allen as Olga Leiner, Margrete's Mother Lisa Orgolini as Girl in Canteen
Stanley Beard as Linda's Father Susie Silvey as Colonel's wife
Sylvia Syms as Linda's Mother Jay Benedict as Wisecracker in War Room
Ronald Nitschke as Horst Drescher Thomas Kretschmann as Man at Zurich Station
Hansi Jochmann as Hedda Drescher Klaus Mnster as Cab Driver
Peter Flechtner as S.S. Officer at Fish Market Markus Napier as S.S. Officer
Alexander Hauff as S.S. Officer at Fish Market Constanze Engelbrecht as Stafson Von Neest
Claus Plankers as S.S. Officer at Fish Market Martin Hoppe as German Soldier
Production[edit]
The production had intended to shoot in Budapest, but the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 made it
possible to shoot the film on location in East Germany. The majority of the film was shot
in Berlin and Potsdam starting in October 1990, just as Germany was being reunified. Studio work
was done at the DEFA Studios, the state film studios of East Germany.
Because all of Berlin's great train stations were destroyed in World War II, the production traveled
some distance to Leipzig to shoot scenes in the Leipzig Hauptbahnhof terminus, built in 1915 and
the largest in Europe. This was prior to its massive modernization by the Deutsche Bahn.
The finale, set at a border crossing and involving a period train, was shot in Klagenfurt, Austria.
The New York City and Washington scenes at the beginning of the film were shot in and
around London and at nearby Pinewood Studios. Locations included the Old Royal Naval College in
Greenwich, Hammersmith, and St Pancras Station, which doubled for Zurich Station for a brief
sequence set in Switzerland.

Reception[edit]
The film was neither a commercial nor a critical success. The Razzie Awards declared Shining
Through the Worst Picture of 1992, with Melanie Griffith being voted Worst Actress (also for her
performance in A Stranger Among Us) and David Seltzer for Worst Director. It also received
nominations for Michael Douglas as Worst Actor (also for Basic Instinct) and for Seltzer in the
category of Worst Screenplay.[3] The film holds a 36% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Roger Ebert wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times, "I know it's only a movie, and so perhaps I should be
willing to suspend my disbelief, but Shining Through is such an insult to the intelligence that I wasn't
able to do that. Here is a film in which scene after scene is so implausible that the movie kept
pushing me outside and making me ask how the key scenes could possibly be taken seriously."[4]
Janet Maslin wrote in the New York Times that the first three-quarters of Susan Isaacs' book "never
made it to the screen," including Linda Voss's love affair and marriage to her New York law firm
boss, John Berringer. "David Seltzer's film version of Shining Through manages to lose also the
humor of Susan Isaacs' savvy novel. Even stranger than that is the film's insistence on jettisoning
the most enjoyable parts of the story."[5]