You are listening to The Next Best Picture podcast, and these are Daniel Howitt's interviews,

with the director for Summer of Soul, Amir Questlove Thompson, and the editor, Joshua L. Pearson.

As soon as you move down, we can start.

Welcome to the Harlem Culture Festival.

Here in the Harlem House.

Well, Kessl, thanks so much for taking time to talk with me about your film Summer of Soul.

Let's just start from the top. How did you hear about all this extensive unused footage of the

Harlem Cultural Festival? I think the real question is, when did I believe it actually happened?

You know, the first part of that answer is in Tokyo for the first time in 1997.

My translator, on Press Day, my translator takes me to a place called the Soul Train Cafe,

which is kind of like a, I joke that it's like an olive garden with 20 monitors in the in the walls when you eat your food.

And there's a whole bunch of soul artifacts playing.

You know, there's Otis Redding over here and, you know, Aretha Franklin over there and that sort of thing.

And I saw maybe three minutes of the slide in the family stone performance from like camera too, which was like far away.

So I couldn't see the faces of the participants.

But I remember seeing the word festival on the wall.

So I instantly thought, oh, well, Europe throws festivals. So, you know,

I thought it was maybe like Monterejazz Festival or like Nice Jazz Festival. Like I knew it was

somewhere in Europe because at that point in 97, with the exception of Lollapalooza, farm aid,

you know, America really wasn't a place for festivals. You'd think, but,

you know, besides Woodstock and really ending with Altamont and the occasional live aid,

you didn't know about festivals. So 25 years later, backstage at the Tonight Show,

...