Miami native Timothy Greenfield-Sanders is a renowned portrait photographer who’s extended his work into several documentary films, including the trilogy The Black List that interviewed prominent African-Americans across many fields. Now he turns his camera on Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison as she applies her enormous storytelling skills to recounting her own life.
She traces her path from Ohio to Howard University and to publishing world of Manhattan. As a single mother, she raised two sons, maintained a job as a book editor and secretly wrote her own novels on the side. Starting with “The Bluest Eye” and through books like “Song of Solomon” and “Beloved,” she made an enormous contribution to literature.
Premiering recently at the Sundance Film Festival, the film was hailed by Variety’s critic: “it locates the heart of the author’s inspirations and attitudes, as well as her guiding ethos to capture grand national truths while focusing on the complex interior particulars of individual experience, Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, at its best, serves the soul of its subject.”
“Enlivened both by its own storytelling dexterity and by the participation of its subject, who at 87 years old remains as warm, vibrant and insightful as ever.”
Variety
USA / 2019 / 119 min / Documentary / PG-13
A film by: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders
Cast: Toni Morrison, Angela Davis, Fran Lebowitz, Oprah Winfrey, Hilton Als, Walter Mosley, Sonia Sanchez, Robert Gottlieb, Farah Griffin, Russell Banks, David Carrasco, Paula Giddings, Richard Danielpour, Peter Sellars
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