I Am Not Your Negro – Wellington Film Society

Raoul Peck, Switzerland/France/USA/Belgium 2016, 93 minutes M violence, offensive language.

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. His published and unpublished words – some of the most powerful and penetrating ever assembled on the tortured subject of American identity – accompany images from old talk shows and news reports, from classic movies and from our own decidedly non-post-racial present. - A.O. Scott, NY Times, 2 February 2017.