NATIONTIME

Nearly ten thousand Black Americans converge on a high-school gymnasium in Gary, Indiana, with the extraordinary ambition of deciding their future together. Republicans share the room with revolutionaries. Agreement is hardly guaranteed. Invited by Amiri Baraka to document the National Black Political Convention, William Greaves captures the exhilaration—and combustible difficulty—of turning a gathering into a political force.

The director of SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXIPLASM has an exceptional feel for what happens between people, and NATIONTIME finds its drama in the current running from the podium to the bleachers and back. Jesse Jackson works the room into a thunderous call-and-response; Baraka struggles to hold it together when delegates object. The stakes extend well beyond the gym: a national agenda demanding guaranteed income and health care, a struggle over who gets to speak for whom. Then Richard Roundtree walks onstage and barely needs to speak at all. With Isaac Hayes supplying the soul, this extraordinary film brings the sheer physical excitement of collective possibility roaring onto the screen.