back

I Am Not Your Negro

Panorama Dokumente 2017
© Dan Budnik
In June 1979 renowned US writer James Baldwin began work on his last, unfinished text ‘Remember this House’. His personal memories of his three murdered civil rights friends Malcolm X, Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King and his reflections on his own painful experiences as a black American serve to re-write American history.
Raoul Peck has turned these thirty hitherto unpublished pages into a powerful collage of archive photographs, excerpts from films and newsreel footage: the boycotts and the resistance against racial segregation in the 1950s and 1960s, the invisibility of black Americans in Hollywood’s legendary works, the Afro-American protests against white police brutality that continue to take place even today, Baldwin’s complex relationship with the Black Power Movement and one FBI report’s paranoid view of Baldwin’s homosexuality. A trenchant and disturbing essay about the reality of the lives of African Americans – lives that are still largely ignored by America’s mainstream. Samuel L Jackson’s voice lends Baldwin’s poetic, meditative language suitable expression.
by Raoul Peck (Director, Screenplay), James Baldwin (Screenplay)
with James Baldwin, Samuel L. Jackson, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, Lorraine Hansberry France / USA / Belgium / Switzerland 2016 English 93' Black/White & Colour Documentary form

With

  • James Baldwin
  • Samuel L. Jackson (Narrator)
  • Malcolm X
  • Martin Luther King Jr.
  • Medgar Evers
  • Lorraine Hansberry

Crew

Director Raoul Peck
Screenplay James Baldwin, Raoul Peck
Cinematography Henry Adebonojo, Bill Ross, Turner Ross
Editing Alexandra Strauss
Music Alexei Aigui
Sound Design David Gillain
Sound Valérie Le Docte
Archival Research Marie-Hélène Barbéris
Producers Rémi Grellety, Raoul Peck, Hébert Peck
Co-Producers Patrick Quinet, Joëllle Bertossa

World Sales

Wide House

Produced by

Velvet Film

Photos

In Focus

Raoul Peck

© Matthew Avignone

Born in 1953 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He trained as an industrial engineer and studied film. His international breakthrough came in 1991 with the documentary Lumumba: La mort du prophète. From 1996 to 1997, Peck served as Haiti’s Minister of Culture. He has screened films at the Berlinale several times, most recently both I Am Not Your Negro and Le jeune Karl Marx in 2017.

Filmography

1985 Merry Christmas Deutschland oder Vorlesung zur Geschichtstheorie II 1988 Haitian Corner 1991 Lumumba: La mort du prophète (Lumumba – Death of a Prophet); documentary 1993 L’homme sur les quais (The Man by the Shore) 1994 Desounen: Dialogue with Death; documentary · Haiti – Le silence des chiens (Haiti, Silence of the Dogs); documentary 2000 Lumumba 2001 Profit & Nothing But! Or Impolite Thoughts on the Class Struggle; documentary 2005 Sometimes in April 2009 Moloch Tropical; IFB Berlinale Special 2012 Assistance mortelle (Fatal Assistance); documentary 2014 Meurtre à Pacot (Murder in Pacot); IFB Panorama 2016 I Am Not Your Negro; documentary 2017 Le jeune Karl Marx (The Young Karl Marx)

Bio- & filmography as of Berlinale 2022