Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize in the documentary competition at Sundance, this beguiling portrait follows poet and activist Nikki Giovanni as she approaches 80 years old. Viewers are invited into Giovanni’s Afrofuturist-feminist philosophies and complicated familial dynamics, as well as her political audacity and poetic eloquence—all knit together with a constant eye and ear for the subject’s own aesthetic verve. By looking back at a personal history cast in the long shadow of American racism, yet propelled forward toward a hopeful future, Giovanni becomes our guide and narrator. In Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, Filmmakers Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson reject documentary conventions, instead embracing intellectual rigor and radical imagination in pursuit of emotional and political fulfillment amid disenfranchisement.

Part of the I Guess It Was My Destiny To Live So Long