What’s Past Is Prologue

How do we, in our present moment, engage with history?

Countless quotes, proverbs, and sound-bites offer definitions, ranging from the professor’s lecture to the Hallmark card. We are obsessed with citing precedence and continuing self-serving traditions, while we simultaneously feed into a globalized sense of urgency to go full-speed ahead through the 21st century. For communities whose health, progress, and civil and human rights have been—and (therefore) continue to be—truncated by oppressive political, racial, and socio-economic forces, the past is prologue; it must inform how we choose to live these crucial chapters as they unfold, and show us what to pay attention to today.

Below are the trailers for two award-winning documentaries screening in NYC this week, Granito: How To Nail A Dictator and The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975.  Decades have passed since the footage was recorded, with both films stitching together archival footage from critical moments in the people’s struggles.

NYC folks hit me up if you wanna catch either/both of these with me.

Part political thriller, part memoir, Granito: How To Nail A Dictator shadows a haunting crime across four decades.  As activists, experts and lawyers build an international human rights case against an elusive and ruthless Guatemalan military dictator, Pamela Yates’s 1982 film When the Mountains Tremble emerges as forensic evidence—a witness to the genocide it documented. Recording the search for truth and accountability, her latest work captures the arc of history as it bends towards justice.

Filmmakers Pamela Yates, Peter Kinoy and Paco de Onís will be at the evening screenings for Q&As the first 5 evenings of the run (Wednesday through Sunday).

The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 mobilizes a treasure trove of 16mm material shot by Swedish journalists who came to the US drawn by stories of urban unrest and revolution. Gaining access to many of the leaders of the Black Power Movement—Stokely Carmichael, Bobby Seale, Angela Davis and Eldridge Cleaver among them—the filmmakers captured them in intimate moments and remarkably unguarded interviews. Thirty years later, this lush collection was found languishing in the basement of Swedish Television. Director Göran Olsson and co-producer Danny Glover bring this footage to light in a mosaic of images, music and narration chronicling the evolution one of our nation’s most indelible turning points, the Black Power movement. Music by Questlove and Om’Mas Keith, and commentary from prominent African- American artists and activists who were influenced by the struggle—including Erykah Badu, Harry Belafonte, Talib Kweli, and Melvin Van Peebles—give the historical footage a fresh, contemporary resonance and makes the film an exhilarating, unprecedented account of an American revolution.

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