Presented by the Melbourne Cinémathèque & ACMI
I Am Not Your Negro
Raoul Peck's essential Academy Award-nominated documentary
You would be hard-pressed to find a movie that speaks to the present moment with greater clarity and force.
Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck (Moloch Tropical, Murder in Pacot), returns with a transcendent documentary examining the life and work of literary iconoclast and queer icon James Baldwin.
The Oscar-nominated I Am Not Your Negro is based on Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript ‘Remember This House’, a stirring, personal account of the lives and deaths of his friends and US Civil Rights Movement leaders Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.
Through these accounts, Baldwin’s considered yet razor-sharp activism bears witness to the impact and legacy of race in America, which forms the focus of Peck’s cinematic dissection of the enduring effects of social and racial inequality.
Narrated by Samuel L Jackson and over a decade in the making, I Am Not Your Negro seamlessly interweaves the historical and contemporary into an experience that blurs the past and present, demanding its audience consider how far we’ve come since the 1960s.
Part history lesson, part biography, I Am Not Your Negro is a remarkable example of the documentary genre and a stirring call to action against injustice in the 21st Century.
Winner Toronto Film Festival People’s Choice Award; nominated Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
– Kristy Matheson, Director of ACMI's Film Programs
Why does it take black trauma for you to believe us?
In 2017, Nayuka Gorrie hosted an open forum after the preview screening of Raoul Peck's essential Academy Award-nominated documentary I Am Not Your Negro. This is their response to the film.
