I Am Not Your Negro at Real Art Ways

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I Am Not Your Negro

Held over for a fourth smash week! 2017 Academy Award Nominee, Best Documentary Feature 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 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.  

"Baldwin’s prescient, pre-African-American-studies insights about the construct and the reality of whiteness are among many ideas that Peck zeroes in on in his swift-moving, multilayered, and appreciative film. (It’s a wonderful introduction to Baldwin, if you’ve never read him.)"

– Hilton Als, The New Yorker

"...life-altering, you would be hard-pressed to find a movie that speaks to the present moment with greater clarity and force... It doesn’t just make you aware of Baldwin, or hold him up as a figure to be admired from a distance... You feel entirely in his presence, hanging on his every word, following the implications of his ideas as they travel from his experience to yours."

– A.O. Scott, New York Times

"An incisive, biting cultural analysis, a psychological examination of a nation - including its culture and institutions - in denial of its own social constructs of race and racism, created to divide us."

– Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service

"A powerful documentary that reframes the words of James Baldwin, one of the great intellectuals of the civil-rights era, for a new generation."

– Sean P. Means, Salt Lake Tribune

"Peck's masterful presentation of Baldwin's ideas lets the audience "see" America through his eyes, making his case intellectually and emotionally."

– Walker MacMurdo, Willamette Week