The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975

Swedish television sent crews to America through the 1960s and 1970s. The journalists filmed the anti-war movement and the Black Power movement: Stokely Carmichael, Bobby Seale, Huey P. Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, and Angela Davis while she was in prison. Then the cans went into the basement of the Swedish national broadcaster and nobody opened them for thirty years. Göran Hugo Olsson found that 16mm material and made a film of it. The narrative runs chronologically, year by year. Instead of narration it uses present-day voices: Questlove, Erykah Badu, Talib Kweli, Harry Belafonte, and Angela Davis commenting on her own image decades later. What distinguishes the film is the vantage. The Swedish crews got into places American television avoided and asked their questions from outside, producing a record that does not exist in the American journalism of the period. It won the documentary editing award at Sundance in 2011. Who it's for: Anyone interested in civil rights and Black Power history and in archive-driven documentary. Who it's not for: The film presents material more than it builds an argument, and can feel fragmentary without background. It is also not a comprehensive history of the movement.