On today’s episode of our daily NYFF60 edition, director Elvis Mitchell and executive producer Steven Soderbergh discuss Is That Black Enough For You?!?, a Spotlight selection of this year’s festival, with NYFF Executive Director Eugene Hernandez.
American film critic Elvis Mitchell’s kaleidoscopic documentary creates a definitive narrative of the Black revolution in 1970s cinema, from genre films to social realism, from the making of new superstars to the craft of rising auteurs. With Is That Black Enough for You?!? (the title referencing a recurring line from Ossie Davis’s 1970 benchmark Cotton Comes to Harlem), Mitchell takes a personal and panoramic approach, expressing his own experiences as a viewer while detailing the cinematic and political histories that led to this extraordinary flowering of a newly ascendant Black heroism. The Learning Tree, Watermelon Man, Shaft, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Cool Breeze, Sounder, Super Fly, Coffy, The Spook Who Sat by the Door, Claudine, Uptown Saturday Night, Cornbread, Earl and Me, Killer of Sheep, and dozens more are analyzed with Mitchell’s customary verve and perspicacity. This is a work of painstaking scholarship that’s also thoroughly entertaining, an essential archival document and testament to a period of American film history unlikely to be repeated. Featuring interviews with Margaret Avery, Harry Belafonte, Charles Burnett, Laurence Fishburne, Whoopi Goldberg, Samuel L. Jackson, Suzanne de Passe, Glynn Turman, Billy Dee Williams, Zendaya, and more. A Netflix release.
To learn more and get tickets for this year's NYFF, taking place through October 16 in all five boroughs of NYC, visit filmlinc.org/tix.
