Jamila Wignot

The documentary simply titled Ailey presents brilliant, choreographer Alvin Ailey through well-researched black-and-white archival video, audio excerpts from Ailey, and informative contemporary interviews with inspired devotees. With this, director Jamila Wignot interweaves the essentials of Ailey’s life story while foregrounding landmark performances, notably Blues Suite (1958), Revelations (1960), and Cry (1971), dedicated to his mother and motherhood at large.

Filmmaker Jamila Wignot has such command of her art that she’s been able to make a documentary in such sympathy with its subject, Alvin Ailey, that we feel as though we understand him from the inside out. This quasi-experimental film that pieces together historical footage, archival footage of Ailey’s works and press interviews, reminiscences of people in his life, and a present-day dance in the making presents a biography unlike any I have ever seen.

Director Jamila Wignot blends performance, poetry and social consciousness in her documentary Ailey, about modern dance legend Alvin Ailey. Wignot crafts an impressionistic portrait of the artist and his time that’s reminiscent of the revelatory I Am Not Your Negro, the 2016 film about iconic writer James Baldwin.