Ahmir ‘Questlove’ Thompson’s Summer of Soul (Or When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) won the Best Documentary Feature March 27 during a dramatic Oscar ceremony that saw actor Will Smith strike compere Chris Rock after a comment made about the actor’s wife.
Ben Proudfoot’s Queen of Basketball, about the pioneering female player Lusia Harris and exec-produced by Shaquille O’Neal, won Best Short Documentary.
Featuring performances by the likes of Nina Simone, Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight and Sly and the Family Stone, Summer of Soul (Or When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) is about the legendary 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival which celebrated African American music and culture, and promoted Black pride and unity.
“This is not about me,” Questlove said on receiving the gong. “This is about marginalized people in Harlem that need to heal from pain.”
Other nominees in the Oscar 2022 Documentary category were Flee by Jonas Poher Rasmussen, Ascension by Jessica Kingdon, Attica by Traci Curry/Stanley Nelson and Writing With Fire by Rintu Thomas, Sushmit Ghosh.
As Questlove told Business Doc Europe in November 2022, curiosity about taking on Summer of Soul was caused partly by embarrassment. He’s a well-informed man when it comes to music – yet he had never heard about this huge musical celebration that happened in Harlem at around the time the Americans were putting the first men on the moon.
“I would like to think that I am a well versed guy in modern events, especially in the world of music,” Questlove told BDE. Friends who know him as a fountain of knowledge sometimes try to trip him up by asking about, say, obscure Prince concerts in Japan. Most times, though, he knows far more than they do. This was one of the few times in which he was, at least briefly, thrown.
Once he discovered this brilliant half century-old material, he began to work out why. It wasn’t just racism on behalf of white American broadcasters and distributors. Timing played a part too. All those performers, from Stevie Wonder to Gladys Knight, were, in 1969, “on the precipice of a cliff of greatness. It was in 1970 that Stevie Wonder, the Staples singers, BB King and Gladys Knights would blossom…they weren’t household names yet. In a year, they would be.”
Nonetheless, there was obvious prejudice behind the decision to bury the material. “There were powers that be that had a problem with the intersectionality of what America was about to become.”
For Ben Proudfoot, the nomination for Queen of Basketball was the second Short Doc nomination in as many years, and follows A Concerto is a Conversation, co-directed with virtuoso pianist/composer Kris Bowers.
Speaking to BDE in March 2022, Proudfoot said: “I think part of our job, part of what achievement looks like in documentary, is identifying a story that ought to be told, that resonates with society in the moment of its release and that captures something true. So I feel good that the story that we have identified now two years in a row is something that people resonate with, but I see it more as a vindication for Horace Bowers (Kris Bowers grandfather) and Lucy Harris, and less as one for Ben Proudfoot.”
There is a very sad footnote to the story. Three days before the Oscar nominations were announced, Lusia passed away, at the very young age of 66.
