“Each of us, each nation, each individual, each race and each gender has a role in this history and we need to confront it."

“Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced,” wrote the late James Baldwin. The work of acclaimed American writer, poet and social critic is put at the center of I Am Not Your Negro (2017), a documentary based on Baldwin’s unfinished book manuscript Remember This House, which reflects on race in America by tracing the lives and assassinations of his three friends Malcolm X, Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King, Jr. Although Baldwin only finished 30 pages of the project by the time he died in 1987, his words still resonate deeply.

An avid reader of Baldwin since his teenage years, Haitian director Raoul Peck weaves the narration of the author’s unfinished book, voiced by Samuel L. Jackson, with clips of old public appearances and raw ...