On March 7, 1965, as voting-rights demonstrators attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., during a march to the state capital in Montgomery, they were met by heavily armed police. And the more we learn about them, the more we want to learn. Their lives may be very different from our own, yet the movie screen opens a portal between us. Heroes of investigative journalism, bank robbers and mob informants and gunslingers, ordinary citizens who fought for justice: These people can come to seem more real to us through movies. In order to qualify, the central story in a film must be at least inspired by a real story that happened to real people-not just a fictional story set against a real backdrop-and a central character based on a real person must do things that his or her real-life counterpart actually did. Each of us can live only one life, but movies that draw on history are windows into the selves that we might have been, had we been born in another time or place or circumstance.įollowing is our list of the top 10 movies based on a true story, as chosen by TIME staff and a select group of historians. To see cities and towns recreated as they were 20, 50 or 100 years ago, to look at the clothes people wore, to hear patterns of speech that have since become outmoded: all of these things remind us that the past was a real place, peopled with human beings who cared about the same things we do, who faced challenges that nearly broke them and who found delight in the same joys we ourselves treasure. And movies based on true stories put us in touch with the past in a visceral way. Sometimes we’re drawn to the library or bookstore, so we can read more about what really happened. But a vivid, enveloping film can draw us close to the spirit of an event or a person in ways that make us want to expand our view.
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