I Am Not Your Negro

With a voice-over by Samuel L. Jackson, Raoul Peck stages an engaging portrait of James Baldwin and allows his work to resonate in the present day.

When James Baldwin died in 1987, he left behind a manuscript entitled "Remember This House". The book was intended to be a personal dialogue with three close friends: Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Medgar Evers. Baldwin combines the memoirs with a reflection on his own painful life experience as a black man in the USA. The documentary film continues Baldwin's furious fragment in the spirit of the author and condenses it into a biting analysis of the representation of African-Americans in the USA. Baldwin's words resound over archive photos and film clips from the 1950s and 1960s, which were still characterised by racial segregation and the almost complete invisibility of blacks in Hollywood; they tell of the formation of the black civil rights movement and Baldwin's complicated relationship with the Black Power movement. Finally, the film spans the arc to the present day: to the white police violence against black people that is still present today, to the race riots in Ferguson and Dallas and to the Black Lives Matter movement.

"Raoul Peck dedicates a fascinating monument to James Baldwin - and at the same time presents a razor-sharp analysis of racism in the USA. He creates the image of an incredibly clever and brilliant social critic who is able to get to the heart of complex issues without distorting them. The history of African-Americans, says Baldwin, cannot be separated from the history of America. On the contrary: 'The history of the Negro is the history of America. And it's not a pretty story." (Philipp Brunner, "Filmbulletin")