American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs

This is a documentary on Grace Lee Boggs, one of the most significant US activists of the 20th century, a Chinese-American who devoted much of her life to the Black Power movement and to the city of Detroit. If you don't know her work and would like some introduction, watch this for sure as she is truly awesome. Unfortunately, the film does not match the commitment and subtlety of her thought, and the framing positions her less within her intellectual and social worlds and more within liberal narratives of violent vs non-violent revolution and whether the Boggs is appropriately engaged with the filmmaker's concerns. The film made me think that if I had done anything worthwhile in my life (I have not) I would be very wary about someone coming to make a doco on me, so perhaps instructive in ways not intended by the filmmaker. There are a bunch of videos online of Boggs telling her own story; hard to imagine anyone genuinely engaged would prefer this instead but perhaps the narrative could engage some people, enough props to the filmmaker for choosing an excellent subject.