I Am Not Your Negro 2016

“Whatever you think about the past and future of what used to be called ‘race relations’ – white supremacy and the resistance to it, in plainer English – this movie will make you think again, and may even change your mind. Though its principal figure, the novelist, playwright and essayist James Baldwin, is a man who has been dead for nearly 30 years, you would be hard-pressed to find a movie that speaks to the present moment with greater clarity and force, insisting on uncomfortable truths and drawing stark lessons from the shadows of history…

To call I Am Not Your Negro a movie about James Baldwin would be to understate [director Raoul] Peck’s achievement. It’s more of a posthumous collaboration, an uncanny and thrilling communion between the filmmaker… and his subject. The voice-over narration (read by Samuel L. Jackson) is entirely drawn from Baldwin’s work. Much of it comes from notes and letters written in the mid-1970s, when Baldwin was somewhat reluctantly sketching out a book, never to be completed, about the lives and deaths of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr…

His published and unpublished words – some of the most powerful and penetrating ever assembled on the tortured subject of American identity – accompany images from old talk shows and news reports, from classic movies and from our own decidedly non-post-racial present…

I Am Not Your Negro is a thrilling introduction to his work, a remedial course in American history, and an advanced seminar in racial politics – a concise, roughly 90-minute movie with the scope and impact of a 10-hour mini-series or a literary doorstop.” — A.O. Scott, NY Times