James Baldwin’s centennial to be celebrated by Film Forum

Next year marks 100 years since the birth of one of America’s greatest public intellectuals and to mark the occasion, a new restoration of I Heard It Through The Grapevine, documenting James Baldwin’s first trip to the Deep South since the end of the Civil Rights Movement, will run at Film Forum along with other related films.    

Baldwin, who was born in 1924, “retraces his time in the South during the Civil Rights Movement with his trademark brilliance and insight on the passage of more than two decades,” write Rich Blint, Baldwin scholar and Jake Perlin, film programmer.  “From Selma to Birmingham, Atlanta to the battleground beaches of St. Augustine, Florida, accompanied by Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, and back north for a visit to Newark with Amiri Baraka, Baldwin lays bare the fiction of progress in post-Civil Rights America — wondering ‘what happened to those who did not die, but whose lives were smashed on Freedom Road.’”

I Heard It Through the Grapevine will be one film in a series of Baldwin docs screening in January:

Full Program:

I HEARD IT THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE
US / UK, 1982
Produced and Directed by Dick Fonatine and Pat Hartley
Approx. 95 min.
Restoration by Harvard Film Archive. Thanks to Haden Guest, Amy Sloper, Brittany Gravely and Mark Johnson. Special thanks to Gugulethu Mseleku, Smokey Fontaine, and the late Dick Fontaine.
Released by The Film Desk

I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO 
US / FRANCE / BELGIUM / SWITZERLAND, 2016
Directed by Raoul Peck
Approx. 95 min.
Released by Magnolia Pictures

JAMES BALDWIN: THE PRICE OF A TICKET
US, 1989
Directed by Karen Thorsen
Approx. 87 min.

“JAMES BALDWIN ABROAD”: JAMES BALDWIN: FROM ANOTHER PLACE 
TURKEY, 1973
Directed by Sedat Pakay
Approx. 12 min.
Preserved by the Yale Film Archive with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation. 
Released by Cinema Conservancy

“JAMES BALDWIN ABROAD”: MEETING THE MAN: JAMES BALDWIN IN PARIS 
UK / FRANCE, 1971
Directed by Terence Dixon
Approx. 26 min.
Picture and audio restoration by Mark Rance, Watchmaker Films, London. 
Released by The Film Desk

“JAMES BALDWIN ABROAD”: BALDWIN’S N****R
UK, 1968
Directed by Horace Ové
Approx. 46 min.
Restoration courtesy of the British Film Institute.
Released by Janus Films

For more information visit Film Forum.