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Portrait of American performance poet and hip hop precursor Umar Bin Hassan and his personal struggle with the revolution he propagated himself since the late 1960s.
As a member of The Last Poets, a group of performance artists articulating the progressive zeitgeist from the late 1960s, Umar Bin Hassan (1948) had a strong influence on later hip hop artists. In one of his best-known lyrics,for Niggers Are Scared of Revolution, he slams his black brothers’ destructive macho behaviour. This portrait mainly concentrates on Hassan’s personal life, where he is still grappling with demons. He grew up in poverty and had a violent, capricious father. Hassan himself, partly due to his crack addiction, left a sad trail of broken relationships and children without a father figure. Older now, he wants to break this destructive cycle.

Credits

Montage
Production company
Stichting Ideefix

Title: Scared of Revolution
Year: 2018
Duration : 1 hour, 11 minutes
Category: Long Documentary
Edition: NFF 2019

Kunst & CultuurGeschiedenis

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