Pretty much any list of 2021’s finest documentaries would include Morgan Neville‘s Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, John Hoffman and Janet Tobias‘ Fauci, Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering‘s Allen vs. Farrow, Todd Haynes‘ The Velvet Underground, Andre Gaines‘ The One and Only Dick Gregory, Mariem Pérez Riera‘s Rita Moreno: Just A Girl Who Decided to Go For It and, of course, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson‘s Summer of Soul.
May I ask why Summer of Soul, which is basically just a restored-concert-footage thing with three or four talking-head interviews thrown in…why is Summer of Soul the runaway presumed winner? It’s a highly engaging, finely tuned musical high, but what’s so “best of the year” about it? Any ideas, suspicions, etc.?
From HE’s 7.16.21 review: “Shot during the mid-to-late summer of ’69 at the Harlem Cultural Festival, the doc is half…make that two-thirds about music and a third about revolutionary-cultural uplift. Changes were in the air; terra firma was shifting. ’69 was the year, remember, when average African Americans began self-identifying as ‘black’.
“And the footage is magnificent. You can almost feel the heat, smell the New York air, grass and trees, the cooked food, the cigar and cigarette smoke and the faint scent of flat, room-temperature beer.
“Most of the film — directed by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, shot a half-century ago by Shawn Peters, brilliantly edited by Joshua L. Pearson — is focused on the great songs and performances, and is what you might call (for lack of a better term) honky–friendly. Nobody says anything about the legacy of inherently evil whiteys or The 1619 Project or CRT…a blessing! Then it becomes more political and more Black-attuned about the serious consciousness elevations that were happening everywhere in all corners, and then it whips back into a more-or-less pure musical mode at the end.”
