Panther Power

When Göran Olsson was at work on Am I Black Enough For You – a portrait of Billy Paul and, in turn, Philly soul – he spent countless hours pawing through film archives in his Swedish homeland, hoping to find any footage of American music in the '60s. Doing so, he got wind of buried treasure. “I heard these rumours, from this old filmmaker, of footage shot in America with the Black Panthers, this treasure of material that had been never used,” Olsson recounts, talking of the cache of archival material – shot by Swedish journalists, then shelved for 40 years – he cut into The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975.

So, was this treasure buried deep? Was it difficult to uncover? “Very much not so,” Olsson laughs, undoing his own myth-making. “It was well-filed. It was just lying there waiting for someone like me. The very first day I was in the archive, I found the speech with Stokely Carmichael, the scene on the couch with him and his mother, and then the interview with Angela Davis in prison. This footage was so amazing that it immediately identified this as a film.”

Olsson also immediately identified the film's narrative. “You see this footage of Stokely Carmichael in 1967: it's black-and-white, they're young, everyone's wearing sharp suits, they're positive, everything seems possible. Then I jump to this footage of Angela Davis in 1972, and it's in colour, and she has this crazy hairstyle, and she's in jail, and she's angry. I immediately identified the story as being everything that happened during that time; what was it that changed these Black Panthers so much?”

Covering the same period as the war in Vietnam, The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 finds a much-documented epoch in American culture viewed “through the very clear perspective of Sweden”, a country whose neutrality during the Cold War made it an interested observer in American politics. Yet, in making the film, Olsson was hardly blessed with such neutrality; this 40-something filmmaker from Stockholm – a documentarian with a history of making movies on music for television – knowing he was about to become an unlikely ambassador for a civil rights uprising from five decades ago.

“I felt this responsibility to take these images out of the basement and show them to the rest of the world,” Olsson says. “I wanted it to be like a book in the library: that if someone was interested in this subject matter, they could find it easily, see this interview with Angela Davis.”

When Olsson first took the film back to America, he wasn't sure what to expect, but an early screening at the Museum Of Arts was met with wild outbursts of applause and triumphant shouts of support (“As someone who's loved New York all his life, it was amazing; for ninety minutes, at least, I felt as if New York loved me back,” smiles Olsson). From there, surviving Black Panthers have openly embraced The Black Power Mixtape's existence. “Bobby Seale, who is in the film, he could've had a different perspective on that time, on the movement, but he loves it; he travels with the film, he introduces screenings,” Olsson beams.

“For me, that's all I could've dreamed of: that the founder of the Black Panther party would love it the way that he has.”