[yasr_overall_rating]
This documentary tells the rise and fall of the Black Panther Party, one of the 20th century’s most alluring and controversial organizations that captivated the world’s attention for nearly 50 years.
The Black Panther party is one of the most ferocious and underestimated groups ever to be created. This film explores the group from start to finish and it does so with a plan that keeps you interested which is key in a biographical film. The shining star of the film is the footage used to note the key situations in the creation and rise of The Black Panther Party. The interviews were matched with the footage in order to create the emotion that was needed to make the points in which the viewer needed to know. The production of this film is just superb.
The film really sets out to clear up misconceptions about the party and really solidifies what they stood for even if, at times, it was to incite violence in order to arrive at the desired conclusion, whatever it may be. The film not only dives into the party’s core but also dives into the stylistic and ideological era that was derived from the “Black Is Beautiful” movement. It focuses on the lives of the people within the party, their style, their day-to-day activities, who they are. The film really explores this and uses it to build on the deeper sense of the party. It is unbiased. It doesn’t just show the bad, it shows the good as well, letting the viewer think and decide their own views on the subject.
This film spends a lot of time in the reasoning for why The Black Panther Party was needed and for good reason, the era had an impressionistic view towards African-Americans and this is shown in the segment on Edgar J. Hoover’s attack on The Panthers. Hoover stifled the change within the group. He started a counter intelligence program in order to neutralize the party…he effectively wanted to keep the group and in that, the African-American people below the mark where they could make a change on the civil rights platform. The film really does a great job in building on that topic with its interviews not only with the members but with historians as well as excerpts from memos at the federal level, it did a great job in controlling the emotion.
The sense of family is also another big component of the film. This segment didn’t focus on the larger players but on the footsoldiers or “backbreakers” as they are called in the film. It created a sense of brotherhood amongst the members due to its militarized mentality yet it still felt as though it had a warmth to it which was again due to interview excerpts that created that feel.
A fun segment I liked was the part which brought up the party’s paper, a newspaper that kept its readers informed on what the party was doing which, to me, created a sense of transparency, which added to the sense that this group wanted to remain a family and a solidified group and the only way to do that was to keep everyone informed. This kind of information (the paper) was never taught when the party came up in history class, as a matter of fact, almost all of this information was new to me.
I think that is what is the most valuable point in which the movie has built on. It shows you the whole picture. It doesn’t focus on a militarized group or a maternity based system of family. It doesn’t just show you men with guns, the film shows presentations led by African American women (which were a large majority of the party in the late ’60s) and men, cooking food for the younger community. It shows you everything and that why this film will be successful, it shows revolution as revolution should be shown.
In select theaters including the Angelika Dallas November 20th
