The strength of I HEARD IT THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE lies not so much in the future it prescribes or predicts but rather in the stories it recalls and the emotions it revives. Baldwin and directors Dick Fontaine and Pat Hartley have used their talents to add new images that inform and move us deeply.
– David Remnick, Washington Post
An admixture of poetry and politics that is extremely well made. Baldwin (from the actual locations) offers present day thought, poetry, and reflection. The windows of the past fill the screen and the Movement’s proud and painful lessons of heroism, sacrifice, dedication, and even death, become vividly clear.
– Charles Rogers, New York Voice
James Baldwin retraces his time in the South during the Civil Rights Movement with his trademark brilliance and insight on the passage of more than two decades. From Selma to Birmingham, Atlanta to the battleground beaches of St. Augustine, Florida, accompanied by Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, and back north for a visit to Newark with Amiri Baraka, Baldwin lays bare the fiction of progress in post-Civil Rights America — wondering ‘what happened to those who did not die, but whose lives were smashed on Freedom Road. – Rich Blint, writer/Baldwin scholar
Directors: Dick Fontaine, Pat Hartley (US/UK 1982) 91 min.
4K restoration by the Harvard Film Archive. Special thanks to Gugulethu Mseleku, Smokey Fontaine, the late Dick Fontaine, and Pat Hartley.
SATURDAY • 12:00
SUNDAY • 4:45
$14. General | $10.50 Seniors & Youth | $8.50 CAFILM members