Black Power Mixtape 1967 - 1975

With the documentary Black Power Mixtape 1967 - 1975 a real piece of American contemporary history comes to our cinemas. The film consists entirely of footage shot by Swedish journalists between 1967 and 1975. The aim of the journalists was to get to the bottom of the reports about the civil uprising and revolutionary movement of the coloured population in the USA. In the process, they managed to get some of the most important figures of the Black Power Movement on camera. Thus, conversations with Stokley Carmichael, Angela Davis, Bobby Seale or Eldridge Cleaver and sometimes very personal moments of these people belong to the impressive results of the work of the Swedish journalists. Moreover, they have succeeded in capturing an exciting, very profound and revealing snapshot of the lives of people of color. Although the footage is an important socio-political document, it disappeared into the archives for over 30 years.

It wasn't until the new millennium that the 16mm footage was recovered in the basements of Swedish Television. Director Göran Olsson has edited the footage together into a gripping chronicle, with commentary from prominent African-Americans such as Harry Belafonte, Melvin Van Peebles and Erykah Badu, and new music from The Roots musician Amir Questlove Thompson and Om`Mas Keith.

Although the footage is over 30 years old and on the surface only deals with U.S. history, the content and lessons the viewer can learn from what is shown unfortunately possess a great deal of relevance and a certain universality. That being said, Black Power Mixtape 1967 - 1975 is simply an impressive document of the times. The footage, which has been gathering dust in the archives for so long, is of a frankness and unadornedness precisely because of the distance that emanates from the Swedish perspective on the American social structure, which also provides the viewer with some perhaps new facts about events that are known in themselves. For example, it is highly interesting to learn that Martin Luther King, actually the symbol of the African-American civil rights movement, did not have such a good standing with many within the black population group, because in their eyes he was too gentle and too willing to compromise with the whites.

Black Power Mixtape 1967 - 1975 is not only exciting history lesson. The film also makes it clear that people are seemingly not precluded from learning from their mistakes. The injustices documented here, which infuriate and sound almost unbelievable, have been repeated over and over again in various forms all over the world ever since. But perhaps it is small things like such a documentary that can gradually help to open the eyes of not only the people who have already understood anyway. An exciting and important documentary that is definitely worth watching in the cinema, despite the old footage and the resulting picture quality. Worth seeing!

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp