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“I Am Not Your Negro”

The James Baldwin documentary from Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck, “I Am Not Your Negro”, made its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival last month, and will follow that up with a screening at the New York Film Festival next month.

Today the Chicago International Film Festival has announced that the film is a last minute addition to their list of films. It will be screened on Thursday Oct 20 starting at 6PM.

As we previously said about the film, it’s is a project made with the blessing and assistance of Baldwin’s estate; one that Peck has been working on for at least 6 years, and has been described as “a very creative documentary.” In short, the film toys with the idea that Baldwin actually wrote what was to be an ambitious book – “a masterpiece” as Peck puts it – on Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., whose lives all ended in assassinations. Baldwin knew it would be a challenge, and didn’t believe it would sell, but he felt that he needed to write it. Baldwin never did write the book (Peck learned about it via letters Baldwin sent to his agent); but Peck’s “creative documentary” will imagine that he did.




As the filmmaker has said: “The starting point of the film is to say – yes, he wrote it. He just didn’t bind it together, but if you go through his work, the film is there.”

Why a film on Baldwin? Peck’s response: “Because Baldwin is my life… I started reading Baldwin when I was 14 or 15, and I realized as an adult a lot of the things I was saying came from him.”

Unfortunately the film, which has been picked up for theatrical distribution by Magnolia Pictures, has no trailer that we can post at this time; although one should be coming out shortly.

Check out the CIFF listing of the film here to find out more information.