I Am Not Your Negro (2016, documentary) or, America's Race Problems

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A huge-sized title and James Baldwin's human stare resting atop makes up this poster for Raoul Peck's I Am Not Your Negro

African-American activist and writer James Baldwin was a sensitive, intelligent, enormously eloquent man, whose expressions on racism in America still resound today.

 

I Am Not Your Negro is written, co-produced and directed by Raoul Peck (Haitian Corner (1987)). It is based on Baldwin's unfinished, 30-page novel manuscript entitled Remember This House.

Presented as a documentary essay, the film shows us three central friends of Baldwin; Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Medgar Evers, who were all assassinated for their racial and civil rights activism. Sharply and with a ripe sense of grief their time is portrayed, and straight lines are drawn from this era to the current police murders and Black Lives Matter movement. It is a bitter, bordering on hatefully poisonous image of the US as a morally bankrupt wonderland of the white, which is painted here. 

Many aspects are missing in the personal perspective on Baldwin, due to racism being the defining trait in everything in I Am Not Your Negro. 

 

 

Watch a trailer for the film here

 

Cost: 1 mil. $

Box office: 9.6 mil. $

= Mega-hit (returned 9.6 times its cost)

[I Am Not Your Negro premiered 10 September (Toronto International Film Festival) and runs 95 minutes. The film opened #24 to a 686k $ first weekend in 43 theaters in North America, where it peaked at #15 and in 313 theaters (different weekends), grossing 7.1 mil. $ (74 % of the total gross). The 2nd and 3rd biggest markets were France with 480k $ (5 %) and the Netherlands with 214k $ (2.2 %). The film was nominated for the Best Documentary Oscar, lost to O.J.: Made in America. It also won a BAFTA, a César award and was nominated for an Independent Spirit award, among many other honors. The-Numbers.com assert that the film additionally made in excess of 2.6 mil. $ on the domestic home video market alone. Peck returned with The Young Karl Marx (2017). I Am Not Your Negro is certified fresh at 99 % with an 8.90/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]

 

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