Magnolia Picks Up Raoul Peck’s ‘I Am Not Your Negro’ — Toronto

Magnolia Pictures has picked up North American rights to Raoul Peck’s documentary I Am Not Your Negro, based on James Baldwin’s unfinished book Remember This House. The book is considered one of the great incomplete works of American literature, where Baldwin attempts to recount the lives and successive assassinations of his friends Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.

Film is narrated by Samuel L. Jackson and turns the 30 pages of the book that Baldwin wrote before his passing in 1987 into a tale of murders, martyrs, politics and race while taking a look at how racial and economic equality in the 1950s and 1960s has shaped attitudes about race in present day.

Deal was negotiated by Magnolia co-EVP Dori Begley and SVP of acquisitions John Von Thaden with ICM Partners and Del Shaw on behalf of the filmmakers. Wide House is repping international rights. ARTE France is a major financier of the film.