Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project review – electric film about radical thinker and poet

Featuring interviews and archive footage of the brilliant civil rights activist, the readings of her poems will have the hairs on the back of your neck standing up

Nikki Giovanni, bestselling American poet and civil rights activist, blazed on to the scene in the 1960s. In this documentary, completed before she died in December, we watch Giovanni in her late 70s, reigning over sold-out public appearances. On stage she recites poems about love, race and gender and in between, with the timing of a standup comedian, she has the auditorium erupting in whoops and laughter. Posing for selfies, a woman tells Giovanni she named her daughter after her; another says she wrote to her on the verge of dropping out of college. “You wrote back. I’m a teacher now!”

In archive footage, Giovanni as a young woman, reads her 1968 poem Nikki-Rosa, which has a line about how white people fail to understand the lives of black people: “they’ll probably talk about my hard childhood / and never understand that / all the while I was quite happy”. Giovanni was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, during segregation and, after witnessing domestic violence at home, she went to live with her grandparents. Speaking in a radio interview she is blunt: “Either I was going to kill him” – she’s talking about her father – “or I was going to move.”

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