AFI Docs 2021: Rise Again: Tulsa and the Red Summer
afi docs 2021With projects like John Lewis: Good Trouble and The Way I See It, Dawn Porter has quickly become one of the most respected documentary filmmakers working today by consistently bringing her filmmaking craft to important snapshots of both the past and the present. Her newest feature Rise Again: Tulsa and the Red Summer – which is streaming as part of the 2021 AFI Docs Film Festival – shows no signs of anything different for her filmmaking. Blending both archival history and modern-day updates; Porter builds not just a powerful spotlight on the often overlooked Tulsa Massacre but also finds a larger perspective on the history of race relations within America, which is as poignant as it is well-crafted.
For any documentary blending the past with the present, the editing is everything. A film's thesis can be as powerful as possible but if the feature gets lost in how it presents and builds that narrative, any impact the thesis holds will be lost. This is a tall and complex task for any editor but to ask someone like Dave Marcus, who is still quite fresh to the world of feature editing, almost feels unfair. Marcus, however, immediately proves himself; the film is one of the best-edited documentaries of the year so far.
Clearly held together not just by Marcus's work but the overall direction it was given by Porter, Rise Again: Tulsa and the Red Summer almost effortlessly wades from various subjects and focuses, always feeling clear and relevant. Even when exploring its larger ideas, such as the history of race relations or the 2020 resurgence in the Black Lives Matter movement, the film is careful to do the subject justice while still remaining within arm's length of its more focused subject. At no point does it feel like the narrative bites off more than it could chew or loses track mid-thought.
This is great considering how rich the material truly is on so many different levels. On a foundational level, the film gives light to one of the largest tragedies in American history. Systematically overlooked and ignored, the truths surrounding the Tulsa Massacre will come as shocking to most audience members and it feels like the feature does the event justice. The film does a hauntingly good job at also showing that, while this event might have taken place in the past, the emotions are still very much so raw and real for so many – making the audience only further engage on an emotional level with the event. The next level of success comes in this being a modern snapshot of race relations within America.
Doing a wonderfully organic job at tying in the modern resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement and capturing the raw authentic emotion behind it, the final level is bringing the past and the present together. Subjects like the inclusion of African men in the Civil War are often overlooked entirely, much less is the actual weight of the fact ever fully realised. The film gives not just a factual light to this history but an emotional one that ties everything it is talking about into a powerful and important final product.
Rise Again: Tulsa and the Red Summer feels undeniable not just as one of the best films of 2021 but also as one of the most important. This is a confident and clean capturing of devastating emotion and overlooked history that demands to be heard and understood. The film is absolutely worth seeking out and should be celebrated for years to come as both a defining modern and historical text.
