ABC Gives Unprecedented Boost To Oscar-Nominated ‘Summer Of Soul’: Primetime TV Slot Ahead Of Academy Awards
10.02.2022 - 23:51
/ deadline.com
Academy Award-nominated documentary Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) is getting a remarkable boost for its Oscar chances – a premiere on network television.
Disney-owned ABC announced it will air the film directed by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson in primetime on Sunday, February 20. The documentary, about the long-overlooked Harlem Cultural Festival of 1969, comes from Disney’s Onyx Collective, Searchlight Pictures and Hulu. Summer of Soul began streaming on Hulu last July, simultaneously with its theatrical release.
“In his acclaimed debut as a filmmaker, Ahmir ‘Questlove’ Thompson presents a powerful and transporting documentary – part music film, part historical record – created around an epic event that celebrated Black history, culture and fashion,” ABC noted in a release. “Over the course of six weeks in summer 1969, just 100 miles south of Woodstock, The Harlem Cultural Festival was filmed in Mount Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park). The footage was largely forgotten – until now.”
The news qualifies as extraordinary in more than one respect. It’s unprecedented for an Oscar-nominated documentary to get a primetime network premiere leading up to the Academy Awards (final Oscar voting begins March 17). Not only that, but the very reason hardly anyone – even Questlove himself, before he began work on the documentary – knew about the Harlem Cultural Festival is that network executives back in the day passed on the opportunity to package the concert footage into a TV special. That fact explains the film’s subtitle, “(…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised).
The original concert footage, shot by Hal Tulchin, remained essentially dormant for half a century, a goldmine of performances by
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