I watched 'AN EYE FOR AN EYE' on Amazon Prime last night, I need to check the Prime list of films more often as there is actually some decent stuff in there.
This is a documentary about the 'Arab Slayer' Mark Stroman, who in the wake of the 9/11 attacks decided he should kill Arabs in the USA as an act of war. He didn't do very well, the three men he shot were from Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. Two of them died, one survived, despite being shot in the face and losing an eye.
He was convicted of murder and sent to jail, but the prosecution had managed to get the charge elevated to capital murder, which can carry the death sentence, (through some dubious contortions which are covered in the film, including an interview with a juror who is still clearly traumatised about her part in sentencing a man to death), and Mark Stroman was sentenced to death.
What happens next is best described as follows:
http://www.filmjournal.com/reviews/film-review-eye-eye865/1000
Quote:
Israeli filmmaker Ilan Ziv makes the tough choice to chronicle this killer’s time on death row, as he awaits execution.
An Eye for an Eye, tough to take as it is—with nigh unbearable-to-listen-to audiotape of the murder being committed—turns out to be one of the most searingly honest and moving depictions of redemption and the power of forgiveness ever made. Although from the most troubled of backgrounds, bearing a swastika tattoo and deeply rooted in the kind of bigotry and violent ignorance—taken to its furthest extreme—which seem to frighteningly inform many of the supporters of this year’s GOP candidate, Stroman admitted to being deeply remorseful over his crimes. And damn if, even riddled with scepticism in most such cases, you don’t believe him.
You, or should I say I, and Ziv, as it turns out, aren’t the only ones. Unbelievably, one of Stroman’s biggest supporters to stay his execution was one of his victims: Rais Bhuiyan, a Bangladeshi man partially blinded in the attack, publicly forgave him and went even further by spearheading a legal campaign to commute his sentence. His interviews are a near-miraculous revelation of unfathomable human goodness, and although Ziv cannot resist the urge to try to attempt a suspenseful “Will he or won’t he fry?” time-ticking denouement for his film, this cheesiness is effectively countered by the pure, heartfelt emotion of Bhuiyan’s words, as well as survivors of both the dead victims and, as it turned out, Stroman.
I could have done with a lot less of Stroman’s frankly lousy doggerel poetry—“I was white trash/just another junkie/that’s why they assigned me a two-bit flunky/and I knew at first glance that I did not stand a chance”—but the man himself, as much as one hates to admit it, impresses. Bathed in a kind of uncanny personal key light, as many born-again proselytizers seem to be, as much as an inked-out hot mess as he is, there is also a transcendent handsomeness and oozing sincerity about him as he plainly states his case and new being. Almost ridiculously, watching him sorrowfully speaking to loved ones or pleading for his life, with his shaved head and burning eyes I was somehow reminded of Falconetti as Dreyer’s Joan of Arc.