Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)

In the summer of 1969 a music festival ran for six weeks in Harlem. Three hundred thousand people attended. Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Sly and the Family Stone, Mahalia Jackson and B. B. King performed. All of it was filmed. Then the footage sat in a basement and for fifty years nobody came for it. The subject is not the concert but why that footage was never released. The producer tried to sell it and the television networks were not interested; the same summer, Woodstock was filmed and distributed worldwide. The documentary presents that difference not as an accident but as a choice. The form interleaves the concert footage with present-day testimony. People who were there were filmed watching themselves for the first time; some say they spent years unable to convince anyone the festival had happened. The strongest passage on stage is the moment Mahalia Jackson and Mavis Staples share a single song. The poem Nina Simone reads sits at the film's political centre. It is Questlove's first film as director and won the documentary Oscar. Who it is for: viewers who like music documentaries and the political history of the sixties. Who it is not for: anyone who only wants the concert; the film keeps stopping the music to supply context.