To say that America is a post-racial nation is to ignore the events that have played out in the streets of cities across the country in the past year. #OscarsSoWhite and #BlackLivesMatter may seem like reductive hashtags, but they speak to a very real concern about representation and prejudice that continues to exist in the country, and while the forthcoming documentary “I Am Not Your Negro” draws on observations made decades ago, it’s vibrantly relevant.
Directed by Raoul Peck, and given some tremendously potent voiceover by Samuel L. Jackson, the film is built from the work the great author James Baldwin had assembled for “Remember This House,” a book he was putting together that would reflect on race through the prism of the assassinations of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. The work was never completed, but what he managed to finish forms the foundation of the fascinating film. Here’s the official synopsis:
In 1979, James Baldwin wrote a letter to his literary agent describing his next project, Remember This House. The book was to be a revolutionary, personal account of the lives and successive assassinations of three of his close friends—Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.
At the time of Baldwin’s death in 1987, he left behind only thirty completed pages of this manuscript.
Now, in his incendiary new documentary, master filmmaker Raoul Peck envisions the book James Baldwin never finished. The result is a radical, up-to-the-minute examination of race in America, using Baldwin’s original words and flood of rich archival material. I Am Not Your Negro is a journey into black history that connects the past of the Civil Rights movement to the present of #BlackLivesMatter. It is a film that questions black representation in Hollywood and beyond. And, ultimately, by confronting the deeper connections between the lives and assassination of these three leaders, Baldwin and Peck have produced a work that challenges the very definition of what America stands for.
“I Am Not Your Negro” opens on February 3rd.
That trailer packs a wallop.