This is a film about the power of speech as political performance: we are transported to a Black Panther rally held on February 17th, 1968 in California.
As improbable as a documentary about Huey Newton and the Black Panthers by Agnès Varda may seem today, its mere existence speaks to a commitment to radical politics that spanned Varda’s entire life. This is a film about the power of speech as political performance: we are transported to a Black Panther rally held on February 17th, 1968, at Oakland Auditorium in Alameda, California. The purpose of the rally? Fight the arrest of co-founder Huey Newton, whose imprisonment for the killing of a police officer was widely deemed a fraud.