The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975(2011)
dir. Goran Hugo Olsson
Swedish cameras caught Black Power as it happened.
Where to watch: Listed on Philo, AMC+, Sundance Now, Apple TV, Amazon Video, Google Play and YouTube per an aggregator (wheretowatch.stream, JustWatch data); access types and prices NOT confirmed - JustWatch page did not load. Verify before adding.Letterboxd ↗
Swedish television journalists spent the late 1960s and early 70s filming Black American activists, and then the footage sat in a basement for decades. Olsson cut it into a mixtape, with voice-over from artists and musicians today. You see Stokely Carmichael, Angela Davis in an interview from prison, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver, filmed by outsiders who were allowed in because they weren't American.
Why it’s here
It's a film that lets the movement speak without the usual narrator. What's punk is the footage itself: unfiltered, funny, angry and unprepared for a prime-time audience. What's pedagogical is the question it leaves open, which is who gets to film whom and what an outsider's camera sees that an insider's would not. Pairs with I Am Not Your Negro, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Note: NR; the figures on screen include people with later violent or complicated records, which the film mostly leaves out. Angela Davis is already in the catalog.
Where This Film Lives
Read Alongside
Books that share a topic, theme, or setting with this film.
Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples
Linda Tuhiwai Smith
Research was a colonial tool. Here is the audit.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History
Michel-Rolph Trouillot
Who decides what counts as history.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
The Colonizer and the Colonized
Albert Memmi
What colonialism does to both people in the room.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Rebecca Skloot
Her cells changed medicine. Nobody asked her.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
The Racial Contract
Charles W. Mills
The founding deal nobody wrote down.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Women of Algiers in Their Apartment
Assia Djebar
Algerian women speak back to the painting.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST