Director Raoul Peck‘s critically acclaimed new documentary I Am Not Your Negro is now in theatres. The Academy Award-nominated film profiles the remarkable life of James Baldwin, the celebrated American novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic.
NPR’s Andrew Lapin writes, “I Am Not Your Negro is also not your Baldwin CliffsNotes. Instead, Peck gives us a far more urgent, revelatory document: a visual imagining of the writer’s last, unfinished manuscript. Titled Remember This House, it was to be Baldwin’s personal reflection on the lives and assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Medgar Evers, all of whom he was close with. ‘I want these three lives to bang against and reveal each other,’ Baldwin wrote. And as these lives bang, Baldwin’s (and Peck’s) gaze turns: from the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s to America’s insistence on imagining great social progress where little has occurred.”
And in his New York Times review, A.O. Scott writes, “To call I Am Not Your Negro a movie about James Baldwin would be to understate Mr. Peck’s achievement. It’s more of a posthumous collaboration, an uncanny and thrilling communion between the filmmaker — whose previous work includes both a documentary and a narrative feature about the Congolese anti-colonialist leader Patrice Lumumba — and his subject.” I Am Not Your Negro is now playing in select theatres. For more info visit IAmNotYourNegroFilm.com. (Image credit: Dan Budnik/Magnolia Pictures)
