movie-review logo az world news

SIDNEY (2022, USA) – 8/10

The great American actor, later director and the first true African-American Hollywood star, Sidney Poitier, unfortunately did not make it to the premiere of the biographical documentary filmed by Reginald Hudlin. Poitier died at the beginning of 2022 at the age of 94, and the film made by the author best known for black comedies from the nineties such as “The House Party”, “Boomerang”, “The Great White Hype” and “The Ladies Man” premiered in September at the Toronto festival. And it is a classic biography about a full and rich life through which Poitier himself leads us as the narrator and recalls his beginnings and growing up in the Bahamas and moving to America as a boy.

Of course, it is a film that thematizes racial issues in America and how Poitier was one of those who pushed the boundaries and who opened doors to other people of his race. Today, Poitier is remembered as the first black man to win an Oscar for Best Actor, and it’s a fascinating story about a man who made it from practically nothing. He recalls his childhood in his native Bahamas, when he didn’t even know not only what movies, television and cinema were, but also that there was electricity. He remembers what it looked like for him as a 15- or 16-year-old kid when he followed his brother to Miami in the early 1940s and realized firsthand how the still-segregated South worked back then.

It is a film that does not deal with some problematic episodes from Poitier’s life, but focuses on his legacy and the fact that he was the first black Hollywood star and how he made it out of nothing. His longtime friendship with his colleague Harry Belafonte, with whom he often differed in his views on racial issues and the way he should position himself during the sixties when the human rights movement strengthened, is also in the center of attention. However, it is a film in which Poitier speaks frankly and in the final phase of his life about the kind of burden he had to carry to be a kind of symbol of the entire race.

IMDB LINK