Inspired by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson‘s award-winning documentary about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, a new festival has been announced for 2023.
Questlove’s Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature at the 94th Academy Awards.
The team behind the new HFC includes Musa Jackson, Nikoa Evans and Yvonne McNair. Harlem native Jackson, editor-in-chief of Ambassador Digital Magazine, attended the original festival as a child and also appears in Summer of Soul.
The inaugural edition of the new Harlem Festival of Culture is scheduled to take place in summer 2023 and will be held at Harlem’s Mount Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park), the same place the original festival was held.
“Being rooted, watered, and grown in this village of Harlem, I believe HFC is our moment to show the world the vibrancy of today’s Harlem—the music, the food, the look, all of it!” Jackson said in a statement.
“The original event was truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience—one that I will never forget. With this initiative, we want to create something that evokes that same sense of pride in our community that I felt on that special day in 1969,” he added. “We want to authentically encapsulate the full scope—the energy, the music, the culture. We want people to understand that this Festival is being built by the people who are from, live and work in this community.”
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