The reason was clear why Tulchin’s Harlem project was thwarted as the entertainment industry and press embraced Woodstock. “I convinced him that this was time to get this film out.” “He had the footage right there in his house in his basement,” Fyvolent recalled. But it had stayed in canisters at his Bronxville home for 50 years as he could not get anyone to finance or release a film. Pearson whittled it down from 40 hours of unseen footage from the festival, which producer Robert Fyvolent found 12 years ago.Ī college classmate had told him about this treasure trove of film from the forgotten festival, so he tracked down Hal Tulchin, who had filmed the festival on four cameras with plans to make a documentary or television special about it in 1969. With Questlove at the helm, the film keeps an impeccable and propulsive rhythm going as it intercuts performances with recollections of attendees. Nina Simone performing a defiant “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” for instance, and Sly and the Family Stone at the height of their powers doing a call-and-response on “I Want to Take You Higher,” the Chambers Brothers doing a propulsive “Going Uptown to Harlem,” which serves as a frenetic scene-setter early in the documentary. Some of the performances the film captures are astounding. Once post-Baby Boom generations start seeing “Summer of Soul,” expect a spike in downloads and streams of music by acts like The 5th Dimension and Herbie Mann, who are captured in showstopping sets. “There’s just all sorts of little gems like that.” “I don’t think a lot of audiences - unless you’re a deep Stevie Wonder fan - has ever seen him play drums before,” Patel said. The film opens with a young Stevie Wonder – dressed in a brown raincoat and yellow ruffled shirt, on the precipice of the 1970s breakthroughs as an artist and activist - playing an extended drum solo. People would be able to see it for themselves.” So we didn’t really need to draw a line very overtly. “It was obvious to people now, if it hadn’t been before. “When George Floyd was murdered and the subsequent uprising happened around the country, I think it was very clear that we didn’t need to do that,” Patel said. It also speaks to the current moment and the movement for Black lives without directly addressing the parallels between 1969 now. “We wouldn’t be doing the music justice or the story justice.” “It couldn’t just be a context-less film,” producer Joseph Patel said in an interview Tuesday. The social context, the filmmakers knew, had to be up front in “Summer of Soul.” “That was the time of my life,” Staples recalls in the film. Jesse Jackson tells the story of King’s last moments from the stage and recalls the hymn he requested after his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech, “Precious Lord,” which leads into a torch-passing moment between the legendary Mahalia Jackson and a young Mavis Staples singing it beside Jackson. The emotional heart of the film is a moving section in which the Rev. Mayor John Lindsay, a supporter who attended the festival - dubbed “our blue-eyed soul brother” by host and producer Tony Lawrence - had supported it in hopes of keeping the peace in Harlem on the one-year anniversary of Martin Luther King’s murder. “It was like we were going to war and we were propelled on a wave of music,” Black Panther Cyril “Bullwhip” Innis Jr. It gets a drive-in sneak preview screening on Sunday, June 20 at Snowmass Town Park. Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award for documentary at the virtual Sundance Film Festival in January, will play theaters nationwide and stream on Hulu beginning July 2. “Summer of Soul (… or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised),” which won both the U.S. A new documentary seeks to right that wrong, bringing the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival to vivid, celebratory life on-screen. In contrast, what some have called the “Black Woodstock,” hosted in Harlem that same summer, has left almost no cultural footprint, has been erased from history and forgotten. The Woodstock music festival has been so cherished, lionized, analyzed and well-documented in pop culture since 1969 that the word itself is all you need to conjure countless iconic rock ’n’ roll images, hippie fashions and larger themes about its political era and the Baby Boomers. ‘Summer of Soul’ will be released in theaters and will begin streaming on Hulu on Friday, July 2.