Thursday 5 September 2013

'Black Power Mixtape' Director Will Tackle Struggle For Liberation via Frantz Fanon In Next Film

Tambay A. Obenson, Indiewire

After attempting to contextualize the Black Power Movement, in a format more accessible to a new generation - what we call a "mixtape" hence the title, The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 - Swedish director Goran Hugo Olsson will continue on that same path, in a similar style, with his next film, revealed over the weekend.

Olsson will incorporate the words from Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth in a new documentary project that will also use newly-discovered archive footage (as was the case with his last film), to explore what he refers to as "the most daring moments in the struggle for liberation in the Third World, illuminating the neocolonialism happening today, as well as the unrest and the reaction against it."

To be titled Concerning Violence, and produced by Annika Rogell and Tobias Janson for Story AB, the project is one of three feature films selected for support by the Swedish Film Institute, with close to $1 million in production funding.

No word on how exactly Fanon's work will be incorporated into the film, but it's worth noting that, for those unfamiliar with his writings, in short, the author's two critically significant works - Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and the aforementioned Wretched of the Earth (1961) - both read like manifestos presenting a utopian vision of a better world where the colonized frees himself/herself and becomes independent of the colonizer, both physically, and mentally.

Fanon’s theories were influential during those years, especially on Third Cinema right from its launch in the 1960s, a time of anti-colonial, revolutionary struggles in the so-called Third World, and rising political movements against the dominance of Western countries; Third Cinema being a film movement that was formed to address the need for a new kind of cinema that critiqued neocolonialism, Western imperialism and capitalism. An anti-oppression stance that challenged the status quo of political and social power around the world that left the Third World (a term I've always taken issue with) at a disadvantage.

So Fanon's work certainly fits into the discussion that director Olsson seems to want to have in his next film.

No ETA yet on when it can be expected, but now that we're aware of it, we'll be watching its progress.


His last film, which comes recommended, The Black Power Mixtape, is streaming on Netflix right now.