Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project

Joe Brewster, Michèle Stephenson
Part of

61st New York Film Festival

September 29 - October 15, 2023

This beguiling, Sundance-awarded documentary portrait follows poet and activist Nikki Giovanni as she approaches 80, exploring her Afrofuturist-feminist philosophical outlook and her poignant relationship with her family with audacity and eloquence.

DIRECTOR
Joe Brewster, Michèle Stephenson
YEAR
2023
COUNTRY
U.S.
RUNTIME
103 minutes

Q&A with Nikki Giovanni, Joe Brewster, and Michèle Stephenson on Sept. 30

The Oct. 5 screening at Bronx Museum of the Arts is free and open to the public! Reserve a spot.

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize in the Sundance U.S. Documentary Competition, this beguiling documentary portrait follows poet and activist Nikki Giovanni as she approaches 80. The film explores Giovanni’s Afrofuturist-feminist philosophical outlook as well as her poignant relationship with her family, her political audacity, and her poetic eloquence, all knit together with a constant eye and ear for its subject’s own aesthetic verve. Looking back at a personal life and history cast in the long shadow of American racism, and forward to hopeful, possible futures, Giovanni acts as our guide and narrator, with refreshingly unorthodox filmmakers Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson refraining from traditional chronologies or talking-head conventions. Going to Mars is fueled by constant intellectual engagement and radical imagination in the search for emotional and political fulfillment in a world of disenfranchisement. An HBO Documentary Films release.

All NYFF61 feature documentaries are presented by:

 Closed captions are available with our capti-view devices for every screening in the Walter Reade Theater and the Elinor Bunin Monroe Film Center. 

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Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project
Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project

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