EXCLUSIVE: HBO Documentary Films is releasing a teaser-trailer for Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, ahead of the prize-winning film’s theatrical release this fall.
The documentary directed by Michèle Stephenson and Joe Brewster, an expected Oscar contender, focuses on the life and work of Giovanni, the renowned poet, activist, and incisive social commentator.
As a jazz score plays underneath in the teaser, Giovanni reads from one of her works: “This is not a poem,” she declares. “This is an explosion. This is a rocket. Let’s ride.”
Going to Mars won the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival in January, where the film premiered. It also won Best Documentary at the Blackstar Film Festival in Philadelphia and the Frameline San Francisco International LGBTQ Film Festival, and won awards at the Freep Film Festival in Detroit and the Ashland Independent Film Festival in Oregon.
The documentary will premiere on HBO and on streaming platform Max in 2024, following its theatrical exhibition. As Deadline reported, HBO acquired U.S. and Canada television and streaming rights to Going to Mars in late August. Oscar-nominated actress Taraji P. Henson voices a number of Giovanni’s poems in the film, and she serves as an executive producer on the project.
“Directors Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson (American Promise, The Changing Same) craft a vision fit for the radical imagination of Nikki Giovanni,” Sundance programmers wrote of the film. “Present-day Giovanni reckons with the inevitable passing of time, while an evocative melding of vérité and archival images act as openings into her mindscape, transcending time and place. Brewster and Stephenson’s approach is imaginative and dreamlike, akin to the way Giovanni’s words are hair-raising in their power to summon unrealized ways of seeing. The Afro-futuristic lens honors Giovanni’s complexity and transports us on a journey through Black liberation from the perspective of one of America’s most acclaimed and beloved writers, a profound artist and activist.”
Giovanni has received countless honors during her career, including seven NAACP Image Awards, the Langston Hughes Award for Distinguished Contributions to Arts and Letters, the Maya Angelou Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Carl Sandburg Literary Award. In 2005, Oprah named her one of her 25 Living Legends. Giovanni, who turned 80 in June, emerged on the national scene in the 1960s and became identified with the Black Arts Movement.
In an interview with Deadline in January at Sundance, Brewster said he first became aware of the poet’s work decades ago, while growing up in Los Angeles.
“There was an emotional connection with her because she was saying things I had never heard. It wasn’t like L.A. concepts, it was definitely East Coast,” Brewster recalled. “But it was questioning, taking ownership of the world, like we were just not [as people] sitting in the backseat.”
“In the ‘70s she was on Black radio. She was doing music to poetry before hip hop,” Stephenson added. “I became familiar with her work in college because I didn’t grow up in the States — I grew up in Canada. But after reading Angela Davis and then going to college with specific classes that I was taking, I became familiar with [Giovanni] and Ntozake Shange and I’ve been in love with her work ever since.”
Watch the teaser-trailer above.