“Someone once said to me that the people in general
cannot bear very much reality.
He meant by this that they prefer fantasy
to a truthful re-creation of their experience.”

James Baldwin

Uit: I Am Not Your Negro, a companion edition to the documentary film directed by Raoul Peck, by James Baldwin and Raoul Peck, Penguin Random House – vintage int. series, 2017, p.69.

Over de documentaire: To compose his stunning documentary film I Am Not Your Negro, acclaimed filmmaker Raoul Peck mined James Baldwin’s published and unpublished oeuvre, selecting passages from his books, essays, letters, notes, and interviews that are every bit as incisive and pertinent now as they have ever been. Weaving these texts together, Peck brilliantly imagines the book that Baldwin never wrote. In his final years, Baldwin had envisioned a book about his three assassinated friends, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King. His deeply personal notes for the project have never been published before. Peck’s film uses them to jump through time, juxtaposing Baldwin’s private words with his public statements, in a blazing examination of the tragic history of race in America.