(OR When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)
Monday 18 October
10am, 6.30pm
Directed by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson
Documentary
United States
117 mins
Over six weeks during the summer of 1969, three hundred thousand people attended the Harlem Cultural Festival to celebrate Black history, culture, music and fashion. The Festival was a series of free shows at New York’s Mount Morris Park that featured a galaxy of future stars – for example, Gladys Knight, an ingenue with a tortoiseshell clip pressed into her teased hair, the 5th Dimension in fringe vests and bell-bottoms, a lanky, velvet-suited David Ruffin who took the spotlight away from the Temptations, and a young Stevie Wonder who shed his Little Stevie image, tearing across the stage between instruments and ripping through a drum solo.
Forty hours of footage from the Festival was placed in a basement, where it sat for about 50 years, unpublished and forgotten.
A labour of love for director Questlove, best known as the ringleader of Jimmy Fallon’s house band, The Roots, the resulting film is an important slice of cultural history, an expression of Black joy, and probably the best concert you’ll never go to.
Over six weeks during the summer of 1969, three hundred thousand people attended the Harlem Cultural Festival to celebrate Black history, culture, music and fashion. The Festival was a series of free shows at New York’s Mount Morris Park that featured a galaxy of future stars – for example, Gladys Knight, an ingenue with a tortoiseshell clip pressed into her teased hair, the 5th Dimension in fringe vests and bell-bottoms, a lanky, velvet-suited David Ruffin who took the spotlight away from the Temptations, and a young Stevie Wonder who shed his Little Stevie image, tearing across the stage between instruments and ripping through a drum solo.
Forty hours of footage from the Festival was placed in a basement, where it sat for about 50 years, unpublished and forgotten.
A labour of love for director Questlove, best known as the ringleader of Jimmy Fallon’s house band, The Roots, the resulting film is an important slice of cultural history, an expression of Black joy, and probably the best concert you’ll never go to.
This is black music at the end of a turbulent decade filled with rights gained and leaders lost. It’s Motown, the blues R&B, Afro-Latin jams and praise-the-lord hymns – songs that are loving, healing, spiritual, carnal, buoyant, enraged. It’s damn near a masterpiece. – David Fear, Rolling Stone
Sonically flawless, authentically textured and deep-rooted in cultural significance, Summer of Soul succeeds magnificently in capturing the scale, spiritual resonance and, yes, soul of the Harlem Cultural Festival. – Whelan Barzey, Empire