Earlier this month reports that Raoul Peck’s James Baldwin documentary would soon premiere, swirled the Internet, and now we’ve got official word that it’s coming….in just over a month.
Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck will reveal his unconventional documentary about the late author and poet at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, Shadow and Act reports. A second screening will follow at the New York Film Festival in October.
6 years in the making, “I Am Not Your Negro” was built on 30 pages of Baldwin’s notes from his book, and the rights to Baldwin’s writings, with the full cooperation of Baldwin’s estate.
The New York Film Festival’s description of the film:
Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck has taken the 30 completed pages of James Baldwin’s final, unfinished manuscript, ‘Remember This House,’ in which the author went about the painful task of remembering his three fallen friends Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, and crafted an elegantly precise and bracing film essay. Peck’s film, about the unholy agglomeration of myths, institutionalized practices both legal and illegal, and displaced white terror that have long perpetuated the tragic state of race in America, is anchored by the presence of Baldwin himself in images and words, read beautifully by Samuel L. Jackson in hushed, burning tones.
When asked, why Baldwin, Peck responded: “Because Baldwin is my life. I started reading Baldwin when I was 14 or 15, and I realized as an adult a lot of the things I was saying came from him.”
Are you excited?
