Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)
Short description
In the summer of 1969, while Woodstock drew national attention about a hundred miles away, another large music event took place in New York. The Harlem Cultural Festival brought more than 300,000 people together across a series of concerts celebrating African American music and culture, and fostering Black pride and unity. The filmed record of those performances went largely unseen, stored away for decades, before being assembled into this documentary. The result pairs that archival material with the story of the festival itself.
Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) is a 2021 American documentary running 117 minutes. It is the first film directed by Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson, the musician and DJ, and it was produced by Robert Fyvolent, Joseph Patel and David Dinerstein. The credited cast numbers 57, among them Stevie Wonder, Chris Rock, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Tony Lawrence, Nina Simone and B.B. King, with several appearing in archive footage.
The film drew a critics' rating of 9.1/10 from 221 reviews, higher than its audience scores of 8/10 on IMDb from 14,713 votes and 7.6/10 on TMDB from 231 votes. It earned about 4 million USD worldwide, a strong return for a documentary. Questlove went on to direct Ladies & Gentlemen... 50 Years of SNL Music in 2025 and Earth, Wind & Fire (To Be Celestial vs. That's the Weight of the World) in 2026.
What's left behind the scenes
- A vast amount of material used in the film was accidentally discovered in a basement, where it had lain for half a century.
- Director Amir-Khalib Thompson managed to reduce 40 hours of footage to just two hours in several stages. First, he cut everything down to 24 hours, then spent more time in the editing room, resulting in 3.5 hours of material, from which he eventually removed another hour and a half. The entire process took Thompson five months.
- In the concert scenes, the viewer hears authentic recordings from those years, made during the festival. The quality of the footage was such that practically no restoration was necessary.
- The Harlem Cultural Festival comprised six concerts held between June 29th and August 24th, 1969, in one of Harlem's parks, and attracted a total of 300,000 attendees.
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