Teacher Guide
Learning goals, teaching notes, and answer keys.
View Teacher NotesPaper & online answer keysAmistad Movie Guide
Explore freedom, evidence, and justice through the Africans’ struggle to return home. Choose the format that fits your classroom.
About the Film
After Africans resist captivity aboard La Amistad in 1839, their journey toward home becomes a legal battle in the United States. The film follows their demands for freedom alongside the work of translators, abolitionists, and lawyers.
Movie at a Glance
- Release year
- 1997
- Genre
- Historical drama
- U.S. rating
- R
- Runtime
- Approx. 155 minutes
- Director
- Steven Spielberg
- Screenplay
- David Franzoni
- Based on
- The Amistad revolt and legal case; a dramatization of historical events
- Music
- John Williams
- Featured cast
- Djimon Hounsou, Matthew McConaughey, Anthony Hopkins, Morgan Freeman, Nigel Hawthorne & Stellan Skarsgård
- Historical setting
- 1839–1841 · West Africa, Cuba & the United States
Runtime listings differ: Paramount lists 155 minutes; AFI lists 152. Check your edition when planning class periods.
Film details: Amblin · Paramount · AFI Catalog
Content to Preview
This is a mature film about enslavement and racial injustice. The opening revolt and later Middle Passage sequence can be especially distressing.
- Graphic violence: bloody killings, whipping, and people forced overboard to drown.
- Nudity & sexual violence: male and female nonsexual nudity during captivity; implied rape.
- Other considerations: dehumanizing treatment, family separation, racist attitudes, and some mild profanity.
Preview your edition, follow school viewing and permission policies, and provide an appropriate alternative assignment. Suggested grades 10–12 are Teach Arcade’s classroom recommendation, not the film’s rating.
Detailed Common Sense Media content advisory (includes spoilers)
Classroom Connections
Connect U.S. History with Government and English language arts through legal reasoning, perspective, rhetoric, and evidence. The case recognized the Africans’ freedom; it did not abolish slavery in the United States.