Assembled from videotape that sat unwatched for half a century, Summer of Soul returns to a run of free concerts held in Harlem during the summer of 1969 and lets the recorded images speak.
What is Summer of Soul about?
In the summer of 1969, a cultural festival in Harlem brought a series of open-air concerts to a public park, and cameras recorded them. The video was then shelved, and most of it went unseen for decades. This 2021 documentary is built from that material. Long passages are given over to complete performances — gospel, blues, soul, jazz and Latin music — cut against wide shots of the crowd, the stage and the surrounding streets. Interviews filmed much later bring in people who were present, who describe what those weeks meant to them and how little of the footage ever reached television.
About the cast
The participants credited on the film include Stevie Wonder, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Jesse Jackson, Chris Rock, Tony Lawrence, Nina Simone, B.B. King and Abbey Lincoln. Some appear in the 1969 video and some in material recorded for the documentary itself. Because so much of the running time is performance, the singers and players are heard at length, in complete numbers rather than clipped highlights.
Context & significance
Summer of Soul is an American production directed by Ahmir-Khalib Thompson, and the catalogue files it under both documentary and music, which describes its structure accurately: here the historical record and the concert recording are the same object. The festival took place in a year when popular music, television coverage and large public gatherings in the United States were all shifting quickly, and the film treats that setting as background rather than as argument. Much of its interest rests on the plain fact of preservation: a large body of video existed, went unused for decades, and was eventually edited and shown.
Watching Summer of Soul on Ktime
This page is free to read without signing in, and playback needs a K-Time account. Once you are logged in, Summer of Soul is available from the documentary and music sections of the catalogue. The interface runs in Farsi throughout, which keeps browsing straightforward for Persian-speaking viewers on phone, browser or television.