SILVER

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize in the 2023 Sundance U.S. Documentary Competition, this beguiling documentary portrait follows poet and activist Nikki Giovanni as she approaches 80. The film explores Giovanni’s Afrofuturist-feminist philosophical outlook, as well as her poignant relationship with her family, her political audacity and her poetic eloquence, all knit together with a constant eye and ear for its subject’s own aesthetic verve. Looking back at a personal life and history cast in the long shadow of American racism and forward to hopeful, possible futures, Giovanni acts as our guide, with actress Taraji P. Henson reading her poems in voiceover and refreshingly unorthodox filmmakers Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson refraining from traditional chronologies or talking-head conventions. GOING TO MARS is fueled by constant intellectual engagement and radical imagination in the search for emotional and political fulfillment in a world of disenfranchisement. (Note courtesy of Kino Lorber.) DIR/SCR/PROD Joe Brewster, Michèle Stephenson; PROD Tommy Oliver. U.S., 2023, color, 102 min. NOT RATED

In Memoriam: Nikki Giovanni (1943–2024)