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Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song Melvin Van Peebles, 1971, USA, 35mm; 97m 40th Anniversary screening with Melvin Van Peebles in person! Setting out to “show all the faces that Norman Rockwell never painted,” writer-director-star Melvin Van Peebles self-financed this groundbreaking independent feature about the radicalization of a professional sex stud. Raised in a Los Angeles brothel, Sweet Sweetback (played as a youth by Van Peebles’ son, Mario, and as an adult by the director himself) enjoys a laissez-faire relationship with the local police, until the night that they brutalize a young Black Panther in his company and he responds in kind. Fleeing through South Central, with the aid of Hells Angels and other picaresque characters, the fugitive Sweetback heads for the Mexico border, always staying one step ahead of The Man. “Arguably the most important black American film of its age,...shot on a shoestring and determinedly flouting Hollywood conventions of self-censorship. A ‘Yeah Production,’ ‘starring The Black Community,’ and dedicated to ‘all the Brothers and Sisters who had enough of the Man,’ it's not what you'd call ‘bourgeois art.’ Totally uncompromising and grindingly repetitive, the film nevertheless accumulates a kind of hallucinatory groove, with unexpected shafts of bizarre humor and vigorous, experimental new wave direction. Written, composed, produced, directed and edited by Van Peebles, it remains one of a kind.” —Geoff Andrew, Time Out Film Guide “Liberation or exploitation? Radical politics or violent nihilism? Mature sexuality or child pornography? Modernist narrative or incoherent narrative? Trailblazer or piece of crap? Melvin Van Peebles' Sweet Sweetback answers to any and all of these descriptions. The Black Panthers made it mandatory viewing, while Ebony magazine denounced it. Moviegoers responded with cheers or outrage. And, frankly, I'm not taking sides.” —Richard Corliss, Time Restored by the Museum of Modern Art with funding provided by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and The Film Foundation.

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