Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson is now an Oscar-winning film director. The Roots artist won his first Oscar for his 2021 directorial documentary, Summer of Soul: (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised).
“It’s not lost on me that the story of the Harlem Cultural Festival should have been something that my beautiful mother, my dad, should have taken me to when I was five years old, and I’m just such a stunning moment for me right now,” Questlove said in an emotional acceptance speech. “But this is not about me. This is about marginalized people in Harlem that needed to heal from pain and just know that in 2022, you know, this is not just the 1969 story about marginalized people in Harlem.”
He choked up and added, “I’m just overwhelmed right now. I’m going to get myself together and thank everyone proper when I get off stage.”
Summer of Soul is about 1969’s Harlem Cultural Festival, a six-week musical celebration featuring performances from Stevie Wonder, Mahalia Jackson, Nina Simone, Sly, and the Family Stone, and Gladys Knight & the Pips, among other ’60s icons.
“I just kept this on 24-hour loop for five months in a row — in my sleep, as I was eating my food, in my office, in my studio, my bathroom,” he told Deadline. “This was all that I watched for five months in a row… It’s almost like I lived with it as if it were an art installation.I’ve had time to think about what this film really is. This film is about Black joy. Our pain is well documented, our struggle is well documented. And we often think the antidote to the pain, the suffering of our story in America to be comedy, or that sort of thing. But it still doesn’t reflect joy and… to me, this was really truly a case of pure unadulterated joy [for the concert audience]. These are people just in their natural joyous element… This was really just the break that people needed in the summer of 1969 in the borough of Harlem.”
Questlove is currently working on another documentary about Sly Stone. He is also co-producing a documentary series about James Brown for A&E with Mick Jagger.
