“ Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project,” an uptempo documentary that matches the poet’s idiosyncratic personality, sees her promoting a new collection of poetry entitled “A Good Cry: What We Learn from Tears and Laughter.” In it, the writer draws upon the raw emotions of her upbringing - a violent father, a loving mother, and a supportive grandmother - and the recent deaths of loved ones and cherished colleagues for a vulnerability that differs from the cool, relentlessly revolutionary image (bedecked in a luminous afro and colorful dashikis) that she cultivated throughout the ’60s and ’70s. Her health problems, however, haven’t dimmed her sharp wit, her charismatic personality, and her unflinching independence. Scenes of her bedroom bathed in blue hues, the overbearing sound of static, the numbing overexposure of light, along with compositions that see her body blinking in and out of reality, visualize her harshest fight. Now in the winter of her life, Giovanni contends with seizures, whose every occurrence depletes her memory. The trailblazing Black woman poet and activist whose words inspired the Civil Rights and Black Power movement, is making an effort to share her deepest, most personal emotions. Filmmakers Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson are capturing Nikki Giovanni in a state of transition.
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