When it came to adapting Richard Wright's 1940 novel Native Son into a film, ex-patriate Frenchman Pierre Chenal and Argentinian producer Jamie Prades swooped in when American filmmakers and actors at the time abandoned the project out of discomfort surrounding the deep current of racism in America that the story reveals. With Wright himself in the leading role, it's a noir thriller about a Black man trying to survive in a white world. This is a brand-new restoration, preceded by a special introduction by film historians Eddie Muller (the "Czar of Noir") and Jacqueline Najima Stewart (co-curator of Kino Lorber's Pioneers of African American Cinema).