Curator: SUZANO COSTA
Free admission with pre-booking: ccf@cineclubefaro.pt
I Am Not Your Negro (2016) – France/USA, DOC, 1h33min M/12
Directed by Raoul Peck
Written by James Baldwin and narrated by Samuel L. Jackson
Synopsis
In 1979, poet and essayist James Baldwin wrote to his publisher that his next project, Remember This House, would be a revolutionary book about the lives and murders of three of his closest friends: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther. King, Jr. – the three greatest black leaders of the 1960s. The work analyzes the history of racism, as well as the treatment given to minorities in North American territory. When he died in 1987, he left only 30 manuscript pages. The unfinished manuscript was entrusted to Haitian director Raoul Peck who, combining texts and archival images in which the author expressed his thoughts, decided to make a documentary on the subject. This extraordinary documentary, narrated by actor Samuel L. Jackson, gives voice to Baldwin’s words and, using precious archival materials, brings racial issues in America back to the forefront. “Eu Não Sou o Teu Negro” is a reflection on the historical struggles for equal rights and the way in which the theme remains current and relevant in the context of the 21st century. Premiered at the Toronto Film Festival (Canada), it was nominated for the Oscar for Best Documentary.
Session of the 26th of August – referring to the 23rd of August – International Day in Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition
The 23rd of August has been marked by the UN since 1998, as a milestone that aims to remember the revolt that took place on the night of the 22nd to the 23rd of August, 1791, in Santo Domingo, a former French colony in the Antilles, territory which currently corresponds to Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and which marks the beginning of the end of slavery and dehumanization, leading to the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade.
This chapter in world history should serve as a lesson for “deconstructing the rhetorical and pseudoscientific mechanisms” that made possible the crime of slavery and slavery, but also structural racism and the continuity of prejudice and discrimination that persist to this day.
In the film cycle Liberating Memory, the curator of this session, Suzano Costa, brings us this powerful and critical film, precisely by a Haitian filmmaker, Raoul Peck, which links an uncomfortable story to the present movements of struggle and continuous demand for civil rights and equality, giving voice to the writings and reflections of James Baldwin.
But in the words of Luís Miguel Oliveira from Jornal Público, “cultural representation precedes political representation, and Baldwin’s combative words insistently return to this point – to tell the story of black Americans, before and after the civil rights movement, is to tell the story of a segment of the population that, for decades (or centuries), had no right, at least on a mass scale, to self-representation. He lived with images created by others, portraits of “creatures that exist only in the imagination of white people” (dixit Baldwin).
Director Raoul Peck demonstrates that the thoughts and causes of Baldwin [1924-1987], a writer barely known and little translated in Europe, continue to echo in the present. And at the movies. In a film that uses a lot of archival material but also new images that he filmed today, it can be seen that essentially, little or nothing has changed The America that never knew how to pacify the relationship between races, and that even today, all these years later of the writer’s death, continues to be torn apart by it.
But what does this have to do with us? Baldwin says that “history is not the past, it is the present, we carry it with us, we are our own history”. As if to say that it is useless to look at this from the outside, to think that it has nothing to do with us, that this is a question “from there”. It is not.
It is enough for us to remember who, when and how this whole story of the transatlantic slave trade began…
Let’s see, with our eyes wide open, where this intersects with our territory, Europe and the common history that separates us – on the 26th of August, because our sessions are on Saturdays, we will be there at the Auditorium of Fortaleza de Sagres waiting for you.
Luísa Baptista on Liberating Memory – August 26th Session – I am Not Your Negro, Lagos, 2023