Blackout for Human Rights’ third annual #BlackoutBlackFriday launches with a series of cultural happenings in New York, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area on November 25, 2016. This includes a nationwide call to action encouraging individuals to refrain from shopping on what is one of the most important shopping days of the year and instead engage in cultural activism in order to protest social and economic injustice in the U.S. The Film Society of Lincoln Center is proud to take part in this event with a screening of Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro, followed by a panel discussion. Details below. This event is co-sponsored by the Workshop on Race and Public Space, Institute for Public Knowledge, NYU.

Schedule:

4:00pm – Tickets available

4:30pm – Doors open

5:00pm – Screening of I Am Not Your Negro (Dir. Raoul Peck, 95 minutes) and short films by Sabrina Schmidt Gordon, Michele Stephenson, and Razan Ghalayini

In this acclaimed new documentary, acclaimed Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck has taken the 30 completed pages of James Baldwin’s final, unfinished manuscript, Remember This House, in which the author went about the painful task of remembering his three fallen friends Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, and crafted an elegantly precise and bracing film essay. Peck’s film, about the unholy agglomeration of myths, institutionalized practices both legal and illegal, and displaced white terror that have long perpetuated the tragic state of race in America, is anchored by the presence of Baldwin himself in images and words, read beautifully by Samuel L. Jackson in hushed, burning tones. A Magnolia Pictures release.  I Am Not Your Negro opens theatrically at the Film Society of Lincoln Center on February 3, 2017.

7:00pm– Panel discussion following the screening, including a special guest as moderator and Deborah Willis, African-American artist, photographer, and curator; Khary O. Polk, Assistant Professor of Black Studies and Sexuality, Women’s and Gender Studies at Amherst College; and NYC-based Alexandria Smith, member of the Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter collective.