Caribbean Beat — January/February 2017 (#143)

SCREENSHOTS
I Am Not Your Negro
Directed by Raoul Peck, 2016, 93 minutes
Raoul Peck is not one to shy away from tackling major
historical figures in his films. Both Patrice Lumumba and
Jean-Bertrand Aristide have been subjects of his camera’s
unflinching gaze, and he’s just
now wrapping up a drama
about the young Karl Marx.
His current film, I Am Not Your
Negro, sees Peck — Haiti’s most
celebrated (and provocative)
director — attempting to get to
grips with James Baldwin, the
United States’ most celebrated
(and provocative) black writer:
a perfect artistic match.
I Am Not Your Negro has its origins in a book about
various civil rights leaders that Baldwin — most famous
for The Fire Next Time, his incendiary 1963 treatise on
race and racism in the US — began working on in 1979,
called Remember This House. He died after making only
thirty pages of notes, and the manuscript was eventually
entrusted to Peck by the writer’s estate.
Spurning conventions of the biographical documentary
such as chronological storytelling and interviews, and instead
exclusively employing archival footage and Baldwin’s words
(intoned with an almost mournful authority by Samuel L.
Jackson), Peck has constructed a stirringly complex visual
essay. The film masterfully delineates the social, political,
and cultural strands — the
movies of a certain Caribbean
actor named Sidney Poitier
are key — that came together
in the creation of a towering
intellectual, as much as it paints
a resonant portrait of the
African-American experience.
The greatest achievement of
I Am Not Your Negro, however,
is its indirect exhortation to the
viewer to return to and re-engage with James Baldwin’s
work — his books, essays, speeches, and interviews, as
potent and as necessary today as they ever were. As Peck
himself instructed the audience at the world premiere of
the film last September at the Toronto International Film
Festival: “Go back to Baldwin.”
For more information, visit velvet-film.com
The House on Coco Road
Directed by Damani Baker, 2016, 79 minutes
More than thirty
years after its tragic
conclusion, the Grenada
Revolution remains an
unresolved affair, many
of its stories still untold.
Packing upwards of half
a century of history into
its slender running time, The House on Coco Road, while
having no pretensions to being a definitive account, is a
welcome, if at times idealised, addition to the annals of
that eventful era.
The documentary takes as its starting point the
experience of its director, Damani Baker, whose mother
Fannie Haughton — a former assistant to civil rights icon
Angela Davis — moved her family from California to
Grenada in 1983 to join the island’s socialist experiment.
Baker then dials back to the family’s beginnings in
the segregated American South, impressively juggling
home-movie footage, archival material, vérité footage,
and interviews to create a testimony to the pioneering
activism of a succession of black women. Meshell
Ndegeocello’s redoubtable score rounds out a moving
experience.
For more information, visit facebook.com/
thehouseoncocoroad
Jeffrey
Directed by Yanillys Perez, 2016, 78 minutes
An affecting portrait of
stolen childhood and
life below the poverty
line is painted in Jeffrey,
the debut feature by the
Dominican Republic’s
Yanillys Perez. Jeffrey
(Joselito de la Cruz) — a non-actor playing a dramatised
version of his actual self — is a twelve-year-old in Santo
Domingo who is made to quit school to help support his
family. Earning a meagre living on the streets washing
windshields, he wants to become a reggaeton singer,
and his dogged attempts to find success give the film its
narrative impetus.
Her filmmaking style a world away from the slick
triumphalism of something like Slumdog Millionaire,
Perez works modestly in what could be called a Caribbean
neorealist mode, unfussily observing her memorable
protagonist and those around him as they go about the
remarkably unremarkable business of survival. And while
Jeffrey ends with Jeffrey’s future very much uncertain,
the film offers the salutary reminder that poverty does
not necessarily negate love.
For more information, visit www.facebook.com/
FilmJeffrey
Reviews by Jonathan Ali
46 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM