Los Angeles Restoration Premiere

A child during Jim Crow, Baldwin never felt at ease in the United States, first finding comfort and community abroad in Paris and later in Saint-Paul de Vence. Yet, he continued to write about the fraught existence of Black Americans and Black Europeans, and his returns to the US fueled his personal philosophy. On one such homecoming, in 1980, Baldwin acts as a docent through the history of the Civil Rights Movement, guiding filmmakers Dick Fontaine and Pat Hartley on a tour of his roots in the South for a documentary essay that “lays bare the fiction of progress in post-Civil Rights America” (Rich Blint).