Amistad is a 1997 Steven Spielberg film based on the true story of a slave mutiny that took place aboard a ship of the same name in 1839, and the legal battle that followed. It shows how, even though the case was won at the federal district court level, it was appealed by President Martin Van Buren to the Supreme Court, and how former President John Quincy Adams took part in the proceedings.

This was the second film for which Anthony Hopkins received an Academy Award nomination for playing a United States President, having previously been nominated in 1995 for playing Richard Nixon in Nixon.

Summary

The film begins in the depths of the schooner La Amistad, a slave-ship carrying captured West Africans into slavery. The film's protagonist, Sengbe Pieh, most known by his Spanish name, "Cinqué," painstakingly picks a nail out of the ship's structure and uses it to pick the lock on his shackles. Freeing a number of his companions, Cinqué initiates a rebellion on board the storm-tossed vessel. In the ensuing fighting, several Africans and most of the ship's Spanish crew are killed, but Cinqué saves two of the ship's officers, Ruiz and Montez, whom he believes can sail them back to Africa.