This year marks the James Baldwin centennial, one of the foremost writers and intellectuals of the 20th century. 

The Harvard Film Archive has beautifully restored this stunning 1982 documentary, which finds James Baldwin revisiting key locations in Civil Rights history, stretching from the South to the North: Selma and Birmingham, Alabama to Atlanta, Georgia and on to the battleground beaches of St. Augustine, Florida and the Dr Martin Luther King Memorial in Washington, D.C. 

On this journey down memory lane, he engages in conversations with friends, activists and fellow writers such as Amiri Baraka, Oretha Castle Haley and Chinua Achebe, reflecting on the past events that sparked the fight against racial segregation, the attacks on churches, racist police brutality and the arbitrary injustices which the Black population had to endure. Questioning their own legacy, these luminaries look at the present and how little has actually been achieved in the wake of the movement, and we the audience are equally encouraged to reflect on our own era. Dick Fontaine skilfully weaves archival materials into the accounts, making his film at once a poignant historical document and highly relevant today in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement.

D: Dick Fontaine and Pat Hartley, US, 1982, 1h32m

Haden Guest, Director of the Harvard Film Archive, will introduce the film and participate in a discussion after with Professor Kimberly Juanita Brown.

Programmed as part of the series "Black France on Film: Race, Diaspora, Hauntings - France & Its Others." This series is co-sponsored by the Departments of African & African American Studies, French & Italian, Film & Media Studies, the Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life and the Leslie Center for the Humanities