Samuel L. Jackson Narrates James Baldwin In New Doc Trailer

A new trailer for Raoul Peck's I Am Not Your Negro has dropped today.

The two minute long clip begins with the film's star James Baldwin, as scenes from an archived interview transition between pictures of Malcolm X, Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King Jr. The trailer then shows various clips from the film, with Samuel L. Jackson narrating some of Baldwin's writing.

I Am Not Your Negro is a documentary inspired by Baldwin's last manuscript that he was working on before his death in 1987. Under the tentative title Remember This House, the manuscript was centered around the deaths of Malcolm, Medgar and Martin, using them as a means of exploring America's complicated relationship with race and racism.

When asked why Peck wanted to do a film on Baldwin, he responded: "Because Baldwin is my life…I started reading Baldwin when I was 14 or 15, and I realized as an adult a lot of the things I was saying came from him."

Peck gained access to all of Baldwin's writing for the project, including 30 pages of notes related to Remember This House. Those notes also included letters between the writer and his agent, where the former knew that the book would be a challenge and probably wouldn't sell, but still wanted to write it anyway.

So far the film has been well received, having earned the People's Choice Award at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival, as well as being critically acclaimed.

"What makes it so compelling is that Peck is able to get at the core of what James Baldwin's life's work was," Shadow and Act's Aramide A. Tinubu offered in a review. "By removing the talking heads and the conventional linear narrative that we see so often in non-fiction work, Peck forces the audience to feel or at least acknowledge what we’ve always felt."

Check out the trailer below and catch I Am Not Your Negro in theaters when it drops on February 3.