Steven Spielberg · 1997 · sea

Steven Spielberg's 1997 history of the 1839 slave-ship revolt. Kidnapped from Sierra Leone and shipped to Cuba, fifty-three Mende captives led by Cinque seize the schooner Amistad off Havana and try to steer home - only to be captured off Long Island and jailed in New Haven. The trial that follows, argued to the Supreme Court by John Quincy Adams, becomes a reckoning over slavery itself.

1. 1
   Sierra Leone

   Cinque and dozens of other Mende are seized inland, held in the slave fortress of Lomboko on the coast, and shipped across the Atlantic in the reeking hold of the Portuguese slaver Tecora.

2. 2
   Havana

   At the Cuban slave market the survivors are sold and loaded onto the schooner La Amistad for a short coastal passage - during which, one night, Cinque breaks his chains and the captives take the ship.

3. 3
   Off Long Island

   Ordered to steer east for Africa, the surviving Spanish navigator secretly tacks north for weeks, until the drifting Amistad is boarded by a U.S. revenue cutter off the coast of New York.

4. 4
   New Haven

   Jailed in Connecticut and charged with murder and piracy, the Africans become the centre of a national trial that climbs to the Supreme Court, where John Quincy Adams argues them free.

5. 5
   Sierra Leone (return)

   Freed at last, the survivors take ship back across the Atlantic for home - as the Royal Navy storms and burns the Lomboko fortress where their ordeal began.