In swift succession, the documentarian Raoul Peck has built a reputation as a connoisseur of the visual essay. His Oscar-nominated 2017 film I Am Not Your Negro reinvigorated the astonishing legacy of essayist and critic James Baldwin through a dramatization of notes on his relationships with such civil rights luminaries as Malcolm X, Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King Jr. The 2021 series Exterminate All the Brutes assembled an impressive bricolage of historical documents, archival footage, personal history, cultural ephemera, scripted scenes, animation and infographics to illuminate nothing less than the genocidal origins and cascading impacts of European colonialism.
Silver Dollar Road, Peck’s latest film, focuses on one Black family’s decades-long legal fight to maintain ownership of their coastal property in North Carolina, but its scope is by no means narrow. The 100-minute film opens with a title card nodding to the unfulfilled promises of Reconstruction: in January 1865, just before emancipation, the Union general William Tecumseh Sherman met with 20 Black ministers in Savannah, Georgia, and asked what they needed. “The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor,” answered the ministers’ representative, Rev Garrison Frazier.
