Independent Lens

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Interviewer

How you doin'? Hi, how are you? - Good. -

Interviewer

Perfect. Pleasure to meet you. (light music) This movie took us 10 years to make. Before tacking the project, we got access to all of James Baldwin's work. My mother handed him the 30 pages of the unfinished Remember This House, which was the book that my uncle was working on and never got to finish because he passed in 1987. A book that would tell the story of his three friends that were murdered. Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. -

Samuel

I want these three lives to bang against and reveal each other, as in truth, they did. And used their dreadful journey as a means of instructing the people whom they loved so much and for whom they gave their lives. He wrote because he felt like he had a mission and to me the movie does an incredible job of illuminating a particular time in history. -

Samuel

The story of the negro in America is the story of America. It is not a pretty story. They needed us to pick the cotton and now they don't need us anymore. And now they don't need us, they're gonna kill us all off. Just like they did the Indians. That's something that Baldwin does. Maybe, the first time you read a passage, it hits you a little bit later that, oh wow. It just makes sense. What you had to look at is what is happening in this country and what is really happening is a brother has murdered brother, knowing it was his brother. Baldwin's work is provocative, riveting, deeply emotional. James Baldwin's words resonate today, as they did 50 years ago. He challenges us. He puts the responsibility on each of us.