'Thank you, James Baldwin'

His smile. How it shined. Lines creasing the corners of his eyes and rippling round his big, gap-toothed grin. When James Baldwin smiled, it wasn't merely an expression of happiness but an upshot, albeit a luminous one, of resistance. What happens when, for instance, in 1968, Dick Cavett asks, "Mr. Baldwin, I'm sure you still meet the remark: Why aren't [Negroes] optimistic? … They say it's getting so much better … They are even accorded the ultimate accolade of being in television commercials." At that, Baldwin beams, answering only as Baldwin can – stirringly, with facts. The Harlem-born novelist, essayist, critic, playwright and poet, who died in 1987, was never satisfied by the appearance of alleged hope. "It's not a question of what happens to the Negro here or to the black man here. The real question is what is going to happen to this country."

So begins Raoul Peck's Oscar-nominated documentary, I Am Not Your Negro, a film about America written by James Baldwin.

Over the course of a decade, Peck, the Haitian-born director whose previous work includes a documentary about his home country's 2010 earthquake, Fatal Assistance, and two features, Lumumba and Sometimes in April, about the Rwandan genocide, had unprecedented access to Baldwin's estate. "I was confronted with a huge amount of material, the rights to both published and unpublished manuscripts," he says over the phone from Paris. "So it took me a while to find an organic entry into his work. The film is a result of all those exceptional conditions."

Faced with material I can only imagine was terribly intimidating to mine – awe-inspiring and provoking thanks to how Baldwin's fierce audit of racial tensions in the United States often feel prescient – Peck decided to structure the film around one of Baldwin's unfinished projects – a book called Remember This House, organized around the lives of his three friends Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, who were all assassinated before turning 40.

"Having this document in my hands, for me as a filmmaker, it was like having an incredible mystery book," Peck says. "This book needed to be not finished, but found. So my theory was that he wrote it already, and my job was to find it through his body of work."

Although an almost unrecognizable Samuel L. Jackson plays the voice of Baldwin in the film, Peck is quick to correct anyone who describes his role as "narrator."

"Narration would have put some distance between Baldwin's words," he tells me. "I wanted to make the film from inside the head of Baldwin." The effect is all at once inciting and elusive; a collision of the past with the present, of Baldwin's self-described "witnessing" of the civil-rights movement, of 15-year-old Dorothy Counts being attacked by a white mob on her way to school, to 50 years later, footage of Ferguson, Mo., and #BlackLivesMatter.

Uninterrupted by traditional documentary tools such as talking heads and instead reliant on archival footage that keeps up with Baldwin's expressive agility, not to mention clips that clearly illustrate Hollywood's history of shameful culpability, Peck describes working on I Am Not Your Negro as inventing a new form. "I don't know of any precedent in that cinematic approach," he says while considering just how impressive it was to be given extraordinary entry into Baldwin's life while also tackling his hardest choice: How to enter?

Baldwin is not Peck's muse but, he says, his "mentor in times of confusion" and Peck's intention was, quite simply, to transport Baldwin emotions onto the screen and share the deep influence he's had on his own life. "When I look at all the books I have throughout my life, and when I went back to my Baldwin books, a lot of them are underlined from the first page to the last page," Peck confides. "You don't read Baldwin, you study Baldwin."

Four out of five documentaries up for an Academy Award on Sunday are made by black filmmakers. I Am Not Your Negro is nominated alongside Roger Ross Williams's Life, Animated; Ava DuVernay's 13th; Gianfranco Rosi and Donatella Palermo's Fire at Sea; and Ezra Edelman's O.J.: Made in America. Believe in the Oscars' red-carpet parade of pomp or don't, that's up to you, but this year's recognition by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is powerful.

When I ask Peck how he relates to Baldwin's words in the film about the disheartening reality of seeing black life on screen, not as who he was, but as society insisted what he was, Peck, who describes his Haitian heritage as being steeped in a strong sense of history and "a strong consciousness about who we are" (and who travelled very young, he tells me, to the Congo), remarks, "What happens to you when are you not coming from, let's say, the very Eurocentric way of seeing the world, you look up to film, books or music sometimes, and suddenly that world you thought you were part of, in fact, you are just a footnote. It's not your story. It's not your narrative. I remember as a young man, reading Faulkner, and trying to look for characters because I couldn't ever totally indulge in the central character."

So, I ask Peck: What now? After all, it's been 10 years of working on this one project. He pauses. "I should speak about the 30 years of my life before. When I used Baldwin. I was in Baldwin. Baldwin was my guy." A moment later he adds, "I want to say, Thank you, Mr. Baldwin. You have been faithful to me. And to many people. My response is to give you back to the people and educate the next generation."

I Am Not Your Negro opens Feb. 24 in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal.