Panorama Documentary: “I Am Not Your Negro”

Panorama Documentary: I Am Not Your Negro

Raoul Peck, a famous Haitian director who once promised to make the most difficult films in the world, was a member of the Berlinale International Jury in 2002, followed by the Cannes Competition Jury in 2012.  In this documentary, which is said to be the most courageous documentary of the year, he zooms in on historical racial issues.

In 1979, the American writer James Baldwin sent a letter to his agent. He wanted to write a personal memoire of his assassinated friends: Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers, and Malcolm X.   However, when Baldwin died in 1987, he only left 30 pages of manuscript. Director Peck tried to complete Baldwin’s book while looking back at the era in which he lived.  He portrays the human rights movement in combination with photos of President Kennedy,  the meeting at the Arkansas University with the ”Mixing race is communism” posters, the Afro-American protest versus police supression, all events which still surface today.

The voice over of Samuel L. Jackson adds a special poetic language to the documentary.