Wed May 23 | 9:30 pm | PC

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Director: Jean-Daniel Lafond, Canada, 2006, 75 minutes

In 2001, when Iranian director Mohsen Makmalbaf’s feature film Kandahar was acclaimed in Cannes and shown around the world, the international press picked up on a surprising appearance. The film’s African-American “doctor” was in fact a man called David Belfield, wanted in the United States for murder and now living in exile in Iran.

American Fugitive: The Truth about Hassan tells the story of this wanted man, an American – known in Iran as Hassan Abdulrahman – who says: “There is life after America.” Through this story of an unrepentant assassin who accuses “the real culprits,” another tale emerges: that of covert networks, international political manipulation and state-sponsored violence.
In Washington D.C. in the summer of 1980, at the behest of Iranian intelligence, David Belfield shot dead Ali Akbar Tabatabai, the former press attaché and representative of the Shah at the Iranian embassy. Tabatabai was thought to be involved in a plot to kill the Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, and topple the new regime.

This story of a young African American’s sudden awareness of race in the aftermath of the killing of Martin Luther King, and of his personal confrontation with Uncle Sam, begins with the Black Power movement of the 1970s and the rise of Islam in the USA. The confrontation continues to this day as David Belfield remains on the FBI’s most wanted list. American Fugitive provides rare insight into one of the most critical issues of our time, and into the soul of a man with no place to go.