I Am Not Your Negro

93 mins, unrated (documentary) ‘‘The story of the Negro in America is the story of America. It is not a pretty story.’’ So wrote author James Baldwin in 1979, in notes to his publisher initially intended to blossom into a book entitled Remember this House.

Incomplete and unpublished by the time of his death eight years later, the letters have been picked up by Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck who brings Baldwin’s typically insightful and beautifully articulated words to life with breath-taking power in this Oscar-nominated documentary narrated by Samuel L Jackson. (Incidentally, the film lost to OJ: Made in America – another exhilarating documentary about differing perspectives on the Black and White experience in America.)

Most notable and most damning is that Baldwin made this comment not in the aftermath of race riots in Ferguson, Missouri or following the murder of yet another black teenager