PUBLISHED ON 16 OCTOBER 2022

Every day, Lumière shines the spotlight on a little-known filmmaker and a movie worth discovering; doing justice to forgotten films in the history of cinema is also the role of the Lumière Film Festival.

Who is he?

Michael Roemer (born in 1928) was a German Jew who emigrated to England and then to the United States just after the war. In the early 1960s, upon observing the racial segregation that oppressed black Americans, he recognized the same mechanism that his family had experienced under Hitler's regime. An academic man and professor at Yale, he made a handful of films in very different genres, which only gained success after they were rediscovered (such as The Plot Against Harry).

His film at the Lumière Film Festival?

Nothing But a Man, which won a prize at the 1964 Venice Film Festival, is a neo-realistic account of a young black couple's difficulty to live peacefully in the American South, where racism and violence are omnipresent. At a time when black filmmakers were few and far between, Roemer and his co-writer Robert Young (later winner of the first Cannes Camera d'Or for his film Alambrista!), two white Harvard graduates, embraced the black cause. There is no talk of cultural appropriation yet…

Nothing But a Man, 1964

What makes it worth discovering?

Because it is apparently Malcolm X's favourite film? In any case, with great empathy for its characters, played by Ivan Dixon and singer Abbey Lincoln, the film poignantly shows the pervasiveness of the "race question" in the United States. And it poses the right problematic: it is because its hero refuses to comply that he loses one job after another. But the revolt is growing…

Aurelien Ferenczi

Screenings:

Nothing But a Man by Michael Roemer (1964, 1h30)
Pathé Bellecour Sun.16 2pm | Villa Lumière Mon.17 8pm