There a rather unique backstory in Goran Hugo Olsson’s The Black Power Mixtape: 1967-1975. Swedish filmmakers came to America to film documentary and news segments about the Black Power movement, most notably the Black Panthers and the SNCC. Shooting on and off for eight years with different filmmakers, an outsider’s perspective shows the side of America that mainstream media either ignored or downplayed.
The film is full of vital information about the causes and effects of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and what happens when minorities rise up against the white patriarchy, and how the U.S. government took methods to control working-class black people through drugs, poverty, assassinations (a theory that Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated because he was becoming more radical and a political threat is expounded upon by drummer ?uestlove of The Roots), and dismissed notable activists like Angela Davis and Stokely Carmichael as “dangerous.†It was fascinating to both hear the contemporary voiceover of Davis’ interview talking about her life back then and see the archival footage of her circa 1972, speaking in great detail about the effects violence has had on her life, and how close-minded people can be when they think she is promoting vigilante justice and rioting. Likewise, Talib Kweli, in a voiceover interview, speaks of how he was detained at the airport several years ago because he was listening to a 1960s Stokely Carmichael interview on his headphones, proving how powerful the man’s words were even nearly a decade after his death.
The Black Panthers, contrary to their white media representation as dangerous and violent, were a social activist group who wanted not only equal rights for black Americans, but social change for the ghettos of America, better education for children, healthier food choices, and safe housing conditions. Their social work to take care of ghetto communities (being the first to provide free breakfasts for children before it was implemented in school lunch programs) is an example of the strength and empowerment that people take to better their communities when the government has failed them. Raw interviews with those affected greatly by ghetto life (a teenage prostitute who is quite vulnerable on camera, and a mother taking care of her children in a run-down apartment) really bring these experiences to life, and the sadness that these stories are still going on everywhere.
The film is made up entirely of archival footage, with voiceovers from insightful interviews with Davis, Carmichael, Erykah Badu, ?uestlove, Kweli, Harry Belafonte, and Kathleen Cleaver. The Black Power Mixtape: 1967-1975 celebrates black Americans, the push for social change, deep intellectual thought, and questioning the structural racism and classism that is institutionalized to hold many people down in society.
Reviewed at the 2011 ND/NF.
