White Flight

Artist: Mats Hjelm (SW)
Genre: Art Film
Sweden, 1997 / Ca. 40 min (DV, 16mm and Beta SP), b/w, colour & sound


The Film

The film tells the history of the Black-Power movement in the USA. In 1968 Mats Hjelm’s father Lars, a renowned documentary filmmaker and journalist, filmed the racial unrest in Detroit and some of the protagonists of the Black Panther. Thirty years later, Mats Hjelm revisited his father’s journey. White Flight combines historical black-and-white documentary material from the sixties with newly filmed colour footage, depicting some of the same places and sometimes also the protagonists from back then. The result is an incisive analysis and a preoccupation with how the past continues to affect the present or is, possibly, forever lost. At the same time, White Flight is Hjelm’s way of artistically taking leave from his father who died in 1996.


Mats Hjelm

For more information please see: www.matshjelm.info