It happened mostly under the radar, when people were distracted by awards season and the yawning terror of the Trump inauguration, but the success of “I Am Not Your Negro” was a truly remarkable one. Raoul Peck’s adaptation of James Baldwin’s unfinished “Remember This House,” examining the history of racism in the U.S., was hardly an easy box office sell, but rave reviews and an Oscar nomination made it a sleeper at the arthouse, and the film went on to make more than $7 million, making it distributor Magnolia’s biggest success ever, and one of the biggest non-fiction films of recent years.
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The company likely have their fingers crossed that another hot-button doc about race in America will prove just as successful: they’re opening “Whose Streets?” in the summer, and have dropped the first trailer for the film. Directed by Sabaah Folayan with Damon Davis, the film is an unsparing, ground-level look at the events in Ferguson in 2015, where protests erupted into resistance after the death of teenager Michael Brown at the hands of local police. Folayan and Davis were civil-rights activists as well as filmmakers, and their hands-on access makes the film an utterly unique take on one of the most notable events in recent American history.
The film won rave reviews at Sundance in January (and put its filmmakers on our Sundance Breakouts list), and now you’ll get a chance to see the film for yourself in a few months. Watch the must-see trailer below, and check out the movie in theaters from August 11th.