DOCUMENTARIES A GRATIS GLOBAL SERVICE
⌕ SEARCH GRATIS GLOBAL ↗
DOCUMENTARIES
The Black Power Mixtape
SOURCE: YOUTUBE · NO TRACKING UNTIL YOU PRESS PLAY · TROUBLE PLAYING? WATCH AT THE SOURCE ↗

The Black Power Mixtape

2 MIN · EN · STATUS: [ STREAMING ]
RATE THIS

Between 1967 and 1975, Swedish television crews got access to the Black Power movement that American networks never did, and the 16mm film they shot sat forgotten in a Stockholm basement for three decades before director Goran Hugo Olsson found it. The footage catches Stokely Carmichael needling a reporter's assumptions, Angela Davis explaining from a jail cell why Black communities distrust talk of nonviolence, and Bobby Seale and Huey Newton building the Black Panther Party's public image in real time. Kathleen Cleaver appears too, part of a movement the Swedish crews treated as a serious political story rather than a domestic disturbance. Olsson arranges the material year by year and lets it run largely without narration, then adds a second layer: Talib Kweli, Erykah Badu, Harry Belafonte, Melvin Van Peebles, and scholar Robin Kelley listen to the old audio and respond on camera, sometimes correcting the record, sometimes just reacting. Questlove supplies music underneath. The result plays like raw dispatches from the era, filtered through people living with its aftermath.