I Am Not Your Negro(2016)
dir. Raoul Peck
James Baldwin, still telling America the truth.
Where to watch: Free on Tubi, rent on Apple TVLetterboxd ↗
A documentary built from James Baldwin's own words, drawn from letters, interviews and the thirty pages of an unfinished manuscript about his friends Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Samuel L. Jackson reads Baldwin's text over archival footage, old Hollywood films and newsreels, and contemporary images of the same fights still being fought.
Why it’s here
The punk move is the structure: Peck refuses the usual documentary apparatus of talking-head experts and lets one voice, a writer who was long ignored and long right, carry the whole film, cutting it against the images that prove his point. The pedagogy is in how it teaches a way of seeing. Baldwin takes apart the stories America tells about itself and shows how film and popular culture manufacture them, which makes this as much a lesson in media literacy as in history. It is dense and unsparing, so it suits older teens and adults who are ready to sit with it.
Where This Film Lives
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