I Am Not Your Negro

2016, 93 minutes

Radical, topical research project by director Raoul Peck on race in the US, connecting the civil rights movement of the 1960s to today’s #BlackLivesMatter. With a voice-over by Samuel L. Jackson.

In 1979, James Baldwin wrote a letter to his literary agent describing his next project, Remember This House. It was envisioned as a revolutionary and personal book about three friends who had been murdered: Malcolm X, Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King Jr. When Baldwin died in 1987, only thirty pages of the manuscript had been completed.

In I Am Not Your Negro, director Raoul Peck brings to life the book that James Baldwin never finished: he has Samuel L. Jackson provide the voice-over for the images, taking viewers along on a journey through the history of the American civil rights movement.

The film received an Oscar nomination and was well-received in the press. Dutch newspaper Trouw called it ‘a unique study of the American racial problems’, and de Volkskrant thought the film ‘equally coercive and irresistible’.

Credits

Themes
Freedom of press, Media and digital culture, Racism and/or discrimination
Suitable for
havo/vwo - bovenbouw
mbo - niveau 3 & 4
Director
Raoul Peck
Country of production
United States, France, Belgium, Switzerland
Type
Documentary
Duration
93 minutes
Year
2016
Age rating
16 angst discriminatie geweld