Chisholm '72 - Unbought and Unbossed

The first black person to mount a serious campaign for the American presidency, and the first woman of any colour to run, Shirley Chisholm was predictably caricatured as a nut job and/or a Nader-esque spoiler candidate at the time of her 1972 campaign. The Brooklyn congresswoman exhibited few illusions of winning, but adhered to Martin Luther King’s advice: that the most radical act black Americans could undertake during the civil rights movement would be to assert the full level of [their] citizenship. Lynch’s fast-paced documentary casts yet another withering glance at America’s deathless winner-takes-all system, which marginalises all but the most moneyed and establishment-endorsed candidates.