I am not your Negro
I am not your Negro
DIRECTED BY: Raoul Peck COUNTRY: United States, France, Belgium, Switzerland YEAR: 2016 SPOKEN LANGUAGE(S): English SUBTITLES: German RUNNING TIME: 93 min
SECTION: Previews at Cinecittà 2021
SCREENINGS
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 successiveassassinations 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 his
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.
BIOGRAPHY
Born 1953 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Peck lived for a time in Zaire and worked as a journalist and photographer. He later graduated from the Berlin Film Academy in 1988, made a dozen short and features from his Velvet Productions, based in France and Germany, and served until recently as the Minister of Culture of Haiti. A book of screenplays and images from four of Peck’s major features and documentary films, called Stolen Images, was published in February 2012 by Seven Stories Press. He has been Chairman of La Fémis, the French state film school, since January 2010. In 2012, he was named as a member of the Jury for the Main Competition at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. He won the Best Documentary prize at the Trinidad & Tobago Film Festival in 2013 for Fatal Assistance. His documentary film I Am Not Your Negro (2016), about the life of James Baldwin and race relations in the United States, was nominated for an Oscar in January 2017.
FILMOGRAPHY
Legut (1983), Merry Christmas Deutschland (1984), Haitian Corner (1988), Lumumba: Death of the Prophet (1990), Man By The Shore (1993), Desounen: Dialogue with Death (1994), Lumumba (2000), Profit & Nothing But! Or Impolite Thoughts on the Class Struggle (2001), Sometimes in April (2005), Moloch Tropical (2009), Assistance mortelle (2013), Murder in Pacot (2014), I Am Not Your Negro (2016), The Young Karl Marx (2017)
SCRIPT: Raoul Peck, James Baldwin PRODUCER: Rémi Grellety, Raoul Peck, Hébert Peck CINEMATOGRAPHY: Henry Adebonojo, Bill Ross, Turner Ross EDITOR: Alexandra Strauss SCORE: Alexei Aigui
PRODUCTION COMPANY: Artémis Productions (info@artemisproductions.com), Close Up Films, Velvet Film (contact@velvet-film.com) WORLD SALES: Wide House (festivals@widehouse.org) GERMAN DISTRIBUTOR Salzgeber & Co. Medien Gmbh (sales@salzgeber.de)