The token image of a white celebrity and a bunch of colored, underprivileged kids serving as the celebrity being all woke and progressive gets rightfully mocked in Stamped from the Beginning. The new Netflix documentary film doesn’t hold anything back as it deconstructs the concept of racism in America. Instead of telling a story, it raises important questions and also comes up with proper, logical answers. Armed with thoughtful animation of many kinds, tons of clippings from popular and accessible movies, and a whole bunch of Black men and women candidly talking about everything uncomfortable, Stamped from the Beginning is a fiery piece of documentary and undoubtedly one of the very best to come out of Netflix in recent times. The credit for that fully goes to its source material, the best-selling book of the same name by author, historian, and anti-racism activist Ibram X. Kendi, as well as...
- 11/21/2023
- by Rohitavra Majumdar
- Film Fugitives
This festival season brought with it a pair of ambitious adaptations of scholarly texts. In Venice, Ava DuVernay premiered Origin, a narrative take on Isabel Wilkerson’s tome, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. The Selma director anchored her adaptation in a tender love story, using Wilkerson’s personal life to understand the intellectual and emotional labor supporting the book’s framework. And at the Toronto International Film Festival, Roger Ross Williams debuted his own film translation of an influential text on race.
In Stamped From the Beginning, Williams uses Ibram X. Kendi’s book of the same name to recast the narrators of Black history. The documentary, which will premiere on Netflix in November, convenes contemporary Black women scholars and organizers to synthesize and contextualize Kendi’s central thesis. The author makes the briefest appearances throughout the film, attesting to Williams’ mission to center Black women.
There’s a...
In Stamped From the Beginning, Williams uses Ibram X. Kendi’s book of the same name to recast the narrators of Black history. The documentary, which will premiere on Netflix in November, convenes contemporary Black women scholars and organizers to synthesize and contextualize Kendi’s central thesis. The author makes the briefest appearances throughout the film, attesting to Williams’ mission to center Black women.
There’s a...
- 9/19/2023
- by Lovia Gyarkye
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
If your education was only gleaned from the American public school system, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Rosa Parks may be the only Black historical figures you know. The limited overview of the Civil Rights movement and slavery is at stake when schools, government, and other authoritative bodies whitewash dark annals of the country’s foundation in today’s direction of banning the passage of the past to future generations. Yet Academy Award winner Roger Ross Williams inhibits America’s violent chapters, taboo portions, and past Presidents from being forgotten in his newest film, Stamped From the Beginning.
His adaptation of scholar Ibram X. Kendi’s book of the same name observes how America imbued concept of race from the 1500s to the present. He deploys a vast archive of past media (including snippets of Omar Little and Officer Alonso Harris reinforcing the criminalization of Black people) that degraded Black people,...
His adaptation of scholar Ibram X. Kendi’s book of the same name observes how America imbued concept of race from the 1500s to the present. He deploys a vast archive of past media (including snippets of Omar Little and Officer Alonso Harris reinforcing the criminalization of Black people) that degraded Black people,...
- 9/12/2023
- by Edward Frumkin
- The Film Stage
A little girl not named Grace sits quietly at the center of Barry Jenkins’ “The Underground Railroad.” Introduced in the third episode holding a finger to her lips, “Grace” — played by Mychal-Bella Bowman and whose real name constitutes a minor yet precious spoiler — has been hiding in a cramped attic for many, many months, waiting for the real, operational, underground railroad to whisk her out of North Carolina and into safer, less confined spaces. Grace isn’t the show’s lead, or even one of the leads, though she does cross paths with Cora (Thuso Mbedu), the chief protagonist and most seasoned traveler, when the grown runaway crawls into Grace’s stooped refuge, seeking similar concealment from the malevolent forces out for them both.
Like so much of the Amazon Prime Video limited series, Grace blends literal and figurative interpretations; she’s a flesh-and-blood character and an ethereal embodiment of...
Like so much of the Amazon Prime Video limited series, Grace blends literal and figurative interpretations; she’s a flesh-and-blood character and an ethereal embodiment of...
- 5/12/2021
- by Ben Travers
- Indiewire
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