Summer of Soul

Directed by Ahmir-Khalib Thompson aka Questlove

Running time: 1hr57 | REVIEWED BY CATHERINE BRAY

Sly Stone, featured in Summer of Soul

Summer of Soul is your invitation to one of the best music festivals you might not have heard of.  Acts include Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Gladys Knight, Sly & the Family Stone, B.B. King, and many, many more.

In 2019, 40+ hours of footage of the Harlem Cultural Festival, attended in 1969 by 300,000 people, were discovered in a basement. The footage is stunning. The performances are stunning. Watching Summer of Soul, you will feel like you are at one of the greatest festivals ever. After a period of time which has been tough for live events, this couldn’t feel like more of a tonic. Being immersed in an eclectic and charismatic line up, enjoying the fashions of 1969, hearing from people who were there at time — this is pleasurable filmmaking with panache to spare.

But Summer of Soul pulls off something very clever. It draws your attention to what is clearly a heartbreaking injustice — and let’s be very clear that it is a cultural travesty that this footage mouldered in a basement for so long — and yet the prevailing emotion is celebratory. It’s a feel-good film, despite the undercurrent of tragedy that so much joyous footage was buried for so long and for such outrageous reasons. The festival was significant, but it was also a party, and director Ahmir Thompson (aka the musician Questlove) successfully honours its legacy appropriately by preserving that sense of the event as a good time, alongside an elegant exploration of the very specific politics of the event and its legacy. Another way of putting it is that it won both the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance (an important film), and the Audience Award (an enjoyable film). Yet another way of putting it would be to say come for the music, stay for the enlightenment. 

SUMMER OF SOUL (2021) Original footage shot by Shawn Peters | Edited by Joshua L. Pearson

In cinemas and online on Disney+ now.