“This is a story about a group of artists that changed the culture forever.”
With those words, the trailer for Elvis Mitchell’s upcoming documentary, Is That Black Enough For You?!? takes you for a ride through the revolutionary Black cinema of the 1970s, a time shaped by cultural and political upheaval.
The title refers to Ossie Davis’ 1970 movie, Cotton Comes to Harlem, one of the dozens of films analyzed and eulogized throughout the film. Writer and film historian Mitchell brings together an impressive array of cultural voices, including legend Harry Belafonte, Samuel L. Jackson, Billy Dee Williams, Whoopi Goldberg, Laurence Fishburne and Zendaya, who provide commentary and personal stories about how these movies changed their lives.
“What I really want this documentary to do is to explain the way people think about Black cultural achievement and cultural phenomenology when it comes to Black culture,” Mitchell told Netflix. “Because people think that if it’s a movie about Black films in the ’60s and ’70s, then it’s got to be about blaxploitation, and it’s not that. There’s as much experimental film going on during that period as anything. The fact is there was no one type of Black cinema in this time period. These movies all contain multitudes.”
But if you’re expecting to sit back and take in a history lesson, think again. Mitchell stresses that this film demands active participation. “I have to be honest. I want it to be provocative. I want to basically get into people’s faces and say, ‘Think about this,’ ” he says, adding, “The excitement I feel about popular culture is what I want to communicate. All these moments that for me were like a series of detonations growing up, I want it to have the same effect on the people who watch. I want to try to recreate the excitement aspect too, that there was this time you could go to movies and be excited by them because if you were a person of color, you start seeing movies like these and you would just go to any of them. Because you just wanted to see what they were going to be like.”
As Samuel L. Jackson puts it in the trailer, “Movies is the stuff of fantasies. I needed a Black cowboy.”
Produced by Steven Soderbergh, David Fincher, Angus Wall and Ciara Lacy, Is That Black Enough for You?!? marks Mitchell’s directorial debut. The film will premiere at the New York Film Festival on Oct. 9.
