'Summer of Soul': The documentary that beat 'Writing With Fire' to win an Oscar

American documentary 'Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Couldn't Be Televised)' won the 2022 Oscar for Best Documentary Feature on March 27/28, 2022.

Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh created history by becoming the first Indians to be nominated for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar. Last Monday, they missed out on what would have been one of the biggest moments for Indian cinema when American documentary Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Couldn't Be Televised) walked away with the coveted prize.

While Thomas and Ghosh couldn't walk up the Dolby Theatre stage, an Indian-origin director-producer was receiving the golden statuette in the Best Documentary Feature category, highly competitive this year with such heavy weight nominees as Flee, Attica and Ascension. Joseph Patel, a bearded Los Angeles-based filmmaker proud of his South-Asian origin, was one of the four main producers of Summer of Soul, now streaming on Disney+ Hotstar.

"It is a very experiential film," Patel, who had a violet Indian scarf around his neck, later said during the backstage interview. Summer of Soul, which completed production in the middle of the pandemic, tells the story of the Harlem Cultural Festival held at the same time as its famous counterpart, the Woodstock Festival, in 1969. Set in the context of the assassinations of Black leaders Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and and the Vietnam War, the film narrates how Black music is American history.

Taking place only 150 km from the Woodstock venue, the Harlem Cultural Festival had Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Mahalia Jackson and B.B. King among the performers. The festival, which was free to all, drew 300,000 people and was filmed. The footage, running into 40 hours, sat in a basement for half-a-century until American director Ahmir 'Questlove' Thompson and Patel came together to show it to the world for the first time.

It was not the first time that Writing With Fire and Summer of Soul had competed for honours on the high table of world documentary cinema. Both films premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in the United States last year and picked up two top awards each. Summer of Soul won the Grand Jury Prize for documentary and the Audience Award for best US documentary while Writing With Fire bagged the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award: Impact for Change and the Audience Award for best world cinema documentary.

The 92-minute Writing With Fire, the third documentary of Thomas and Ghosh after their 2011 Dilli about Delhi's slumdwellers and Timbaktu on the organic farming revolution in Andhra Pradesh the following year, tells the story of the newspaper Kabar Lahariya founded in 2002 in Uttar Pradesh and run by Dalit women. The directors follow the newspaper's chief reporter Meera and her fellow journalists in Writing With Fire.

In the 117-minute Summer of Soul, Questlove, whose previous film Detroit (2017) was about the 1967 riots in the American automobile industry capital, digs up the old recording of Harlem Cultural Festival on videotape and mixes it with interviews with festival attendees and performers to give a contemporary meaning to celebration of Black music and culture.

In the film, the first artist on stage at the Mount Morris Park in Harlem is Stevie Wonder. Aged 19 then, he sings and gives a rousing performance on the drums sending a packed audience of women, men and children into joy. Gospel music was a major element of the Harlem festival. "Gospel was the therapy for the stress and pressure of being black in America. We didn't go to a psychiatrist, we didn't go lay on a couch, we didn't know anything about therapists, but we knew about Mahalia Jackson," says a festival attendee who heard the famous singer perform in Harlem in the summer of 1969.

Joseph Patel is one of the four main producers of 'Summer of Soul'.

"This is about marginalised people in Harlem that needed to heal," Questlove said in his Oscar acceptance speech. "This is not just a story of 1969 Harlem," he added, choking with emotion. Interspersed with performances and interviews, the film portrays the changing style of the Black and Brown people in America in the late '60s and the creation of a new world through music and culture.

The stage and audience too mingle, metaphorically, in the energy transported by the Harlem festival. The archival footage shows little girls accompanying their parents breaking into impromptu dance moves while their heroes sing and dance on the stage. The film's last act is the performance by Nina Simone, who first sang her famous song, To be young, gifted and black, during the festival in Harlem. The song became part of her Black Gold album the following year.

Described as the "Black Woodstock", the Harlem festival was incredibly forgotten for 50 years until Questlove and his producers decided to bring it alive once again at a time the world is grappling with the devastating effects of racism. It was not an easy job as the production team struggled with digitising and restoring the 40 hours of videotapes discovered in a basement.

Patel is not resting on his Oscar laurels. He has already announced plans to back Questlove as his producer for another documentary - this time on the American band Sly and the Family Stone. The San Francisco band, which influenced American pop and hip-hop music, followed up their Harlem performance with a hugely successful show at the Woodstock festival a few weeks later.