By Channing Kennedy
Color Lines
“The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975” is an incredible documentary with an equally incredible story behind it. The film, which opens in New York this week, is constructed entirely from hundreds of hours of archival footage of the black power movement, footage that’s not just rare, but unseen; it was shot by a Swedish news crew in the 1960s and 1970s, then left untouched in a Swedish TV station’s cellar for 30 years, where it was discovered by documentary filmmaker Göran Hugo Olsson.
Olsson knew he had something amazing on his hands and had no difficulty finding interested parties. In the finished feature-length film, the present-day voices of Harry Belafonte, Erykah Badu, Angela Davis, Bobby Seale, ?uestlove and others bring context to the history.
“The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975” drew critical acclaim after screening at Sundance in January. I had the privilege of seeing it at the True/False Film Festival in Missouri, and I haven’t shut up about it since. So I was thrilled to speak with Olsson on a transatlantic Skype call last week, and to ask him about Sweden’s little-heard connection to the black power movement, his role as a white, European man telling the story of black American communities, and the future of archival footage.
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