The 71st British Academy Film Awards (BAFTAs) were held on February 18, 2018, at the Royal Albert Hall in London, honoring the best national and foreign films of 2017.
Released in February 2017 in the US and in France in May, the documentary “I am Not Your Negro” by Haitian director Raoul Peck, dedicated to the extraordinary journey of African-American writer James Baldwin won the BAFTA Award for Best Documentary at the British Academy Film Awards on Sunday in London.
“I Am Not Your Negro” has already received numerous awards, including Best Documentary at Berlin, Toronto, Philadelphia, and Chicago. The film is also in the category of best documentary of the year for the ceremony of Caesars in France, which will take place on March 2.
Here are excerpts from a PBS Independent Lens article in which Craig Phillips interviews Peck.
The worldly Haitian-born filmmaker Raoul Peck and his family fled the Duvalier dictatorship in 1961 and found asylum in the Democratic Republic of Congo, before Peck finished his schooling in the United States, France, and Germany. Currently living in both France and the U.S., Peck has been given numerous Human Rights Watch awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001. He doesn’t make a ton of films (his Lumumba: Death of a Prophet is also critically acclaimed and some of his feature films, like Sometime in April, have aired on HBO) — but when he does, he makes them count. His Oscar-nominated I Am Not Your Negro, which makes its TV debut on Independent LensJan. 15 [check local listings], was not only one of the year’s most acclaimed films but was the second highest-grossing documentary of 2017.
Centered around writer James Baldwin and his previously unpublished book (voiced by Samuel L. Jackson), about race in America and the legacies of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr., I Am Not Your Negro is not just an extraordinary film, but so well-timed. Continue Reading Here
