Summertime (2020)

Black Soil is a film festival featuring stories from the global hip-hop community. With a unique range of films consisting of short and feature-length films, classics and documentaries, Black Soil presents cinema deeply rooted in hip-hop culture. This year's theme is "Respect The Architect," through which the festival pays tribute to the founders, pioneers and genesis of hip-hop.

“Summertime” chronicles the intersecting stories of 25 young spoken word poets over a day in Los Angeles. Born of the director’s mind-blowing interaction with a workshop where performers from across the City of Angels recited fearlessly personal texts, the project was structured so that their voices could individually shine as well as coalesce in the context of a larger, unified, and gloriously moving narrative experiment — part urban musical and part sociological art.

Before the film, you can watch Michael "Boogivision" Pinckney's short film I Am A Man (2021, 6'), in which four very well-known black artists have a heartfelt conversation about masculinity, creativity, sex and their place in the world. IAAM filmmaker Michael Pinckney does a short introduction. 

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