This is what it feels like to be one of the only black people in the audience while watching gripping black stories at the film festival. “Power to the people!”
Pirkle Jones/The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution / Via Sundance.org
As a Sundance Film Festival newbie, the most striking thing to me so far — especially as someone who covers Black Hollywood — is that this year's line-up offers a series of films that capture landmark black experiences and is serving them to a predominantly white audience.
These films speak directly to the lives of my fellow tribe members today and to the struggles that our parents and grandparents fought so hard to live through and overcome. It's important for non-brown viewers to witness the heartbreaking civil rights battles of singer Nina Simone, or the contemporary reality of being killed for being a black teen who blared loud music at a gas station, or the affecting footage of the valiant rise and heartbreaking fall of the Black Panther Party, all the more poignant considering its biggest supporters included a largely non-black base.
That film — The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution — is excellent. It's the latest from director Stanley Nelson, who came to the festival in 2010 to premiere Freedom Riders, a moving documentary that highlighted the story behind the hundreds of civil rights activists who faced down segregation. In Nelson's latest film, the women's voices are as vital and important as those of their male counterparts, something not often seen in documentaries about times of social change. The fact that these women aren't tied to their husbands or lovers, but are seen as entities of their own, makes The Black Panthers all the more exceptional.
I was practically still shaking the morning after viewing the documentary, overwhelmed by the idea that young people were able to assemble and create an organization that caused high-ranking government officials to tremble and respond in — at times — violent ways.
Pirkle Jones/The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution / Via Sundance.org
Nelson, who is known for exploring African-American experiences in telling documentaries, is a smart man, and he's making strategic decisions in presenting The Black Panthers. This documentary will open the Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles after it leaves Sundance, the former festival being a space where such a film seems meant to have its first viewing. After its festival run, Nelson plans for the film to have a limited theatrical release at some point, before landing on PBS in February 2016.
Coming to the Sundance Film Festival first — an event where you can almost count the number of black participants on one hand — was the bold choice, and one with a greater meaning: the real goal here is to have as many people see a film like this as possible — black, white, or otherwise.
"About six weeks ago, we brought some activists together at the Ford Foundation and had them look at the film and said, 'What do you think? Is this a film you can use? Or is it something that's a little bit too scary?' All of them said they see this as a film about young people realizing the power that they had," Nelson said in a Q&A after his documentary premiered to a packed house on Jan. 23. "It was very clear it didn't work for the Panthers, and there were mistakes made. What's going on in this country is amazing. It could be the start of some real change. I think that hopefully we can get this film out to people and more and more people can use it. That's our hope."
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