Set in seventies America, Alonzo ‘Fonny’ Hunt (Stephan James), a man of colour is falsely accused of rape and get chewed up by the system. It’s a slow grind for both the incarcerated and the viewer. Even the love and effort of both of his families, his and hers, cannot sway the outcome.

Filmed with subdued colour pallets and dimly lit scenes, we see the affection that Fonny feels for Clementine ‘Tish’ Rivers (KiKi Layne) but their young love is anything but easy and carefree. New York in the seventies was ripe with racial prejudice and it negatively impacts the young couple as almost every turn. After a run-in with a white police officer played by Ed Skrein, Fonny becomes a marked man and ends up falsely accused and incarcerated.

The film is told in a non-linear fashion and provides background on the couple’s transition from childhood friends to young lovers. It’s not an easy watch and it never lets you approach it without a sense of the horrors that racism imparts on our world. Even with the all difficulties and sorrows that these families go through, their love for one another remains. Love does conquer all.

Rob Hudson
www.bealestreetmovie.com.au

From acclaimed director Raoul Peck (The Man by the Shore, Lumumba, Murder in Pacot), I Am Not Your Negrobrings to life Remember This House, the unfinished manuscript of American novelist and intellectual James Baldwin. Narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, this blistering film shares Baldwin’s personal experience of racism as considered through the lens of civil rights leaders Medgar Evers, Malcom X and Martin Luther King Jr.

A most expertly crafted documentary of recent times I Am Not Your Negro offers crucial insights into the history of racism in the United States and acts as a stirring call to action against injustice in modern America and beyond. Director Raoul Peck says; “Never before has Baldwin’s voice been so needed, so powerful, so radical, so visionary.”

ACMI’s Head of Film Programs, James Hewison says; “A deeply personal memoir about the revolutionary James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro is made by iconoclast filmmaker, Raoul Peck. This Academy Award®-nominated documentary serves as a rallying point to not only chronicle the seismic impact of the US Civil Rights movement but also to bear witness to Baldwin’s considered yet razor-sharp activism and demands of its audience to ask profound questions of race relations today, not just in the U.S. but indeed Australia in 2017.”
Not just a cinematic experience, ACMI will highlight Baldwin’s voice in a provocative program of special event screenings. Audiences will be challenged to take their viewing of I Am Not Your Negro beyond the screen and share their opinions of race relations in Australia.

On Monday 11 September ACMI, The Saturday Paper and DocPlay will co-present a special preview screening of the film followed by a town hall-style discussion of race relations, inviting audience members to discuss the themes in the film. Leading the discussion will be filmmaker and activist Khoa Do, editor of The Saturday Paper Erik Jensen, and ACMI’s James Hewison.

Opening Thursday 14 September, ACMI will present The Sound of Resistance, a creative response to I Am Not Your Negro. Following a screening of the film, celebrated local musicians will discuss the power of the protest song followed by an intimate performance in the ACMI Cafe & Bar. The Sound of Resistance explores music as a potent form of cultural expression, political protest and as a vital call to action.

Race Politics and Identity on Sunday 24 September offers audiences a rare chance to hear from influential thinkers on African American race politics. Former Kansas State Senator, Donald Betts Junior and American History Professor, Michael Ondaatje. As Donald Betts Junior says, “We need to raise it up, we need to fight and to shout, but we also need to bring it down, to talk and to listen in order to make change.”

ACMI continues to present films that challenge and inform audiences, offering a space for conversation and debate. I Am Not Your Negro and its associated programming provokes greater examination and discussion not only about the historical and contemporary effects of racism globally but also the chasm that exists in contemporary culture for the celebration of ideas, intellectualism and debate in wider society.

I Am Not Your Negro is screening at ACMI from 11 September to 1 November 2017. For tickets and information please visit acmi.net.au/ianyn.

I Am Not Your Negro
11 September – 1 November 2017
ACMI, Melbourne
acmi.net.au/ianyn