In the spirit of amazing documentaries centered around racism in America (which include stunning 2016 films like Ezra Edelman's O.J.: Made In America and Ava DuVernay's 13th), Magnolia Pictures will be releasing I Am Not Your Negro, a documentary by Raoul Peck that breathes life into the final manuscript that the acclaimed James Baldwin was working on before his death in 1987.
The manuscript, which had the working title of Remember This House, focused on the deaths of civil rights leaders Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Medgar Evers to bring up the conversation about America's overall problem with race, and racism as a whole. In his dynamic documentary (which already won the People's Choice Award at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival, and has received critical acclaim from damn near everyone who's seen it), Peck takes Baldwin's words and not only looks at the lives of these three men, but the history of racism as a whole through films, television, and in society, from the era of The Birth of a Nation in the early 1900s through the Black Lives Matter movement of today.
In our conversation about the film, Peck said he had been working on this project for 10 years after gaining access to Baldwin's archives from his family. He not only spoke on why he felt he needed to have an actor like Samuel L. Jackson become the voice of Baldwin via his narration ("The voice, I knew that was the only way to tell that story. The question toward the end was, how do I get someone with a tremendous capacity for acting and also some street credibility as a person?"), but he also expressed why this film needs to be seen by the youth of today.
"I think it's key. We are lost," Peck said. "We have a youth that is totally lost in terms of how to find a right track or even how to learn to make allies, how to organize. Those are basic things that somehow went away." He went on to say, "We need to have organization for the long run, not for one issue, not for one murder, but for everything coming to us in the next 20, 30 years. Everything is linked, and we forgot that."
Check out the official trailer for I Am Not Your Negro up above, and make sure you go see it when it hits theaters on Feb. 3.
