I Am Not Your Negro is an award-winning 95-minute documentary film from 2016, which was shot on the basis of the unfinished novel manuscript “Remember This House” by James Baldwin (1924 – 1987). In the film, Peck attempts to capture the racism of US society in a chronological panorama from 1890 to 2014 by means of cinematic collage and the life story of three friends of Baldwin from the civil rights movement who were murdered in the 1960s: human rights lawyer Medgar Evers (+1963), Black Muslim Malcolm X (+1965) and Baptist pastor and civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr.

James Baldwin (*1924 in Harlem, New York City – 1987+ Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France) was one of the most important writers of the 20th century. Books like “The Fire Next Time” (1962) deal with racism and sexuality. Raoul Peck (*1953 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti) is a filmmaker and screenwriter who became internationally known through the documentary (1990) “Lumumba: La mort du Prophète” (1992) and the feature film “Lumumba” (2001), among others.

The Mahalla Festival follows a call by the international literature festival berlin (ilb) on cinemas, schools, universities, television stations, the media, cultural institutions and individuals for a worldwide screening of I Am Not Your Negro by Raoul Peck on 10 December 2020, the anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed by the United Nations in 1948. The film illuminates the continuity of racism and documents the resistance against it, which is also articulated in art. The worldwide screening of Raoul Peck’s film is also intended to emphasize our responsibility to process the history of colonization and racism in detail. 400 years after the first slaves were brought ashore in chains in Jamestown, Virginia, the equal treatment of whites and People of Color is by no means established. Over nearly four centuries, an estimated 10-12 million enslaved Africans were transported to the Americas, mainly by European traders. More than 250 years after the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, the equal treatment of whites and People of Color is by no means established – neither in the Americas nor in Europe nor in other regions on the globe.

You can find several Online-Screeners among the Followers of the Call worldwide in several Languages for Free:

https://www.literaturfestival.com/festival-en/projekte-en/Worldwide%20Screening/WWS%20Baldwin%20Peck%20e

On Mubi you also find a version with Turkish subtitles: https://mubi.com/tr/films/i-am-not-your-negro