History Film Forum: Questlove’s Summer of Soul Screening

The History Film Forum is an online series from the Smithsonian that explores history on the screen and the evolution of film as public history.

The Harlem Cultural Festival took place the same summer as Woodstock and boasted an attendance on a par with that event 100 miles away. More than 300,000 people filled Mount Morris Park for six weeks of extraordinary performances by artists including Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family Stone, Nina Simone, B.B. King, the Staple Singers, the 5th Dimension, David Ruffin, Mahalia Jackson, and Gladys Knight and the Pips.

Despite the stellar lineup, the 1969 music event received little mainstream media coverage, and 40 hours of performance footage shot by the late television pioneer Hal Tulchin remained in storage for 50 years.

That long-unseen material has been transformed into the feature documentary Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), the directorial debut of musician, songwriter, author, and five-time GRAMMY Award recipient Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson. Join a conversation with Thompson and producers Joseph Patel, Robert Fyvolent, and David Dinerstein, and moderated by Fath Davis Ruffins, a curator at the Smithsonian American History Museum, as they explore the making of the film and the event’s historical significance.

Presented by Smithsonian Associate and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History through the generous support of Dan Manatt and Democracy Films.