The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975

This documentary, created from the raw footage of Swedish journalists who came to the US to cover stories of racial unrest during the late sixties and into the mid seventies, is most effective when it lingers on the best of this raw footage.  The meticulous restoration and editing together of all this old material doesn’t really add up to anything new in terms of perspective on that time period, or the black power movement, but it does give viewers some fantastic, never-before-seen interview footage of Stokely Carmichael, Bobby Seal, Eldridge Cleaver and (most especially) Angela Davis.  This is not an attempt at a comprehensive history, and those who don’t already know something about the civil rights movement won’t have a clue what they are looking at, but this is presented as a “mix tape” and the footage is a powerful addendum and occasional counterpoint to the brief histories of this chapter of US history that we get from more organized documentaries.