I Am Not Your Negro

  • Screening Dates: 17th May, 8 pm   //  31st May, 6 pm
  • Starring: Narrated by Samuel L Jackson
  • Directed by: Raoul Peck
  • Running time: 93 mins
  • Rating: M
  • Language: English
Synopsis:

DOCUMENTARY:

This Oscar-nominated documentary draws an astonishing, challenging and utterly contemporary examination of race in the United States entirely from the writings and interview footage of civil rights icon James Baldwin.

“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…

SOURCE: NZIFF