I Am Not Your Negro

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’.

I Am Not Your Negro is part of the Chosen by YOU theme programme.