I Am Not Your Negro

2017
7.9| 1h33m| R| en| More Info
Released: 03 February 2017 Released
Producted By: ARTE
Country: United States of America
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
Official Website: http://www.iamnotyournegrofilm.com/
Synopsis

Working from the text of James Baldwin’s unfinished final novel, director Raoul Peck creates a meditation on what it means to be Black in the United States.

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Reviews

Skunkyrate Gripping story with well-crafted characters
AnhartLinkin This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.
Robert Joyner The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one
Jonah Abbott There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.
arfdawg-1 I was hoping I would like this movie, but the net net is that there is nothing new and it's just plain boring.A complete rehash of the past that the left can't let go of.Do yourself a favor and ship this monstrosity. In fact, start boycotting agenda based films.
Karl Self First of, you have to hand it to Samuel Jackson. He could make my tax statement sound captivating. Next, director Raoul Peck manages to back him up with a stunning visual collage of archive footage.So "I Am Not Your Negro" is a surprisingly easy watch, despite the fact that it is based on an unfinished script by James Baldwin So why is this movie called "I Am Not Your Negro"? I don't know. And in any case, I don't want "you" to be my negro. Baldwin's text is called, equally obliquely, but less catchily, "Remember This House".What I got from this movie was that James Baldwin was a trained preacher, who tried to be an acolyte to far more charismatic civil rights activists (in the case case of Malcolm X, black racist) Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., who were murdered before they were 40 years old (and in Malcolm's case, by black henchmen of his own cult). The film has to pussyfoot around the fact that two other protagonists of the era, the Kennedy brothers, were also murdered, despite the fact that they were not downtrodden and as white as the cliffs of Dover.Baldwin is seen trying to convince liberal white Americans, who were all for civil rights in the first place, that fighting racism was somehow not an act of altruism but somehow would contribute to their own betterment.And also that the white sheriff in "In The Heat Of The Night" and "Mr. Tibbs" have an erotic tension going on between them.
Abdirashid Diriye Kalmoy The nominee for the best documentary feature at the 89th academy awards, I Am Not Your Negro is already considered a cinematic spectacle in its own essence by a variety of critics. The poignant and cogent documentary is realistically scathing the contemporary and prevalent disenfranchisement of African-Americans with a retrospective narration of civil rights era's horrendous and dehumanizing conditions that prevailed less than a generation ago.The principle figure in the documentary is the celebrated African- American essaying and novelist James Baldwin (1924-1987). It is based on his unfinished manuscript of the novel Remember This House in which he documented his personal views on the civil right movement, the precarious conditions of African-Americans and his engagements with civil rights activists like Medgar Evers(1925- 1963), Malcolm X(1925-1965) and Martin Luther King Jr (1929-1968) who were all assassinated for their stance and activism on equality, civil liberty and the emancipation of African-Americans from a system that oriented its legitimacy and policies on slavery and Jim crow heritage.The documentary director is the Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck. We remember him from his existentially nuanced works, like the documentary Lumumba (2000) which is about the Congolese freedom fighter and first prime minister of independent Congo Patrice Lumumba(1925-1961) who also demised at the hands of US and Belgium intelligence operatives. It is narrated by Samuel L. Jackson with a sonorous voice that arrests the viewers attention and initiates an irresistible compassionate empathy for the 'lived experiences' of African-Americans. Raoul Peck draws much of the narrated script from letters and notes written by James Baldwin during the 1960s and 1970s and wove video clips melodiously with them, and the result is a sublime and original documentary film .I Am Not Your Negro, is a necessary intervention at a time when the global world is marred by racism, xenophobia and a deleterious identity politics. The resurgence of nationalism based on negativism (Brexit) and the mushrooming of the likes of Donald Trump and 'strongmen' across Europe discloses howhumanity failed to transcend an excruciating 'modern' racism and the failure of 'project Humanity' – multiculturalism, Tolerance and plurality. The documentary exposes the facile in modernity's claimed progress when it comes to issues of race and 'humanity' of black people in general.Raoul Peck, reminds us of this gawking reality that the conditions of African-Americans has not changed at all – think of the Black Lives Matter and Baltimore uprisings. It is hard to avowedly enunciate the difference between what James Baldwin and his ilk faced and the contemporary challenges faced by African-Americans and Black people across the world. We exist in a continued adversary and detrimental conditions - in terms of economic, psychology and identity - that our parents experienced not so long ago. The issues James Baldwin begrudged and grappled with is what this millennial generation articulates and ventures to 'face and solve' with all its intricacies. Hamid Dabashi, the Iranian philosopher praised Raoul Peck metaphorically in a recent Aljazeera article that he '' has poured Baldwin's beautifully aging wine in a masterfully crafted new bottle''.This year we have witnessed and exulted at the monumental towering of films by Black actors and directors with Moonlight, Fences and The Birth of A Nation taking center stage in cinema. The subject of their themes has been peculiar to African-American lives and its historiography as it meandered through the turbulent waves of the American dream. James Baldwin emphatically comprehended and discerned the African-American pariah figure and her conditions throughout his oeuvres and director Raoul Peck clothed it with a superficial cinematic poignancy and authenticity. I Am Not Your Negro lacks any blemish and I posit confidently that it's the documentary-film of this year 2017. Highly recommended for all.
Howard Schumann A documentary of searing intensity, I Am Not Your Negro is based on an unfinished manuscript by author James Baldwin (Go Tell it on the Mountain, The Fire Next Time) who details his reminiscences of and friendships with civil rights leaders Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, whose betrayal and murder he lived to witness. Narrated from the unfinished manuscript by Samuel L. Jackson using an authoritative modulated voice that matches Baldwin's speaking style, Peck's film is more than a retrospective of three civil rights leaders but a persuasive, intuitive case for Baldwin as a poet and prophet.Weaving in old speeches and writings from other books, the film provides an emotional look at the stain of racism in American history through the eyes of a man of impeccable eloquence and depth. Though he was an outspoken critic of American culture, the irony is that he was the only black spokesman that white America could relate to. Peck includes sequences showing the excessive force used by police officers in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, photos of Tamir Rice and Trayvon Martin, civil rights protests marches from the 1960s, White-power rallies, and the assassination of Martin Luther King.It is a powerful highlight reel of institutional racism punctuated by Baldwin's acerbic rhetoric, only somewhat mitigated by Bobby Kennedy's speech on King's murder and his prediction that we will have a black president within the next 40 years. Being gay at a time when it was considered as a sickness, Baldwin was always an outsider but it was a vantage point that enabled him to look at American society with blistering detachment. "And what has happened," he said, "is as though I, having always been outside it—more outside it than victimized by it, but mainly outside it—can see it better than you can see it." In his provocative TV interviews such as those on the Dick Cavett show, Baldwin pulls no punches in articulating his outrage at the hypocrisy of Western democracies, singling out Hollywood movies such as Love in the Afternoon and Lover Come Back and stars Gary Cooper and Doris day as being examples of our collective fantasies and their "grotesque appeals to innocence." Reflecting on his childhood, Baldwin recounts how he realized how "This country has not in its whole system of reality evolved any place for you," and that rooting for the cowboys to kill the Indians, was in fact cheering for the oppressors against himself.Wearily resigned about the Negro's chance for equality in a white-dominated society, Baldwin's outrage often comes across as bitterness and despair yet his message does not feel outdated. He said, "Your history has led you to this moment, and you can only begin to change yourself by looking at what you are doing in the name of your history, in the name of your gods, in the name of your language." His words are even more relevant in today's bitterly divided America in which the fire may not wait for the next time.