Black Panthers (film)
1968 film by Agnès Varda
Black Panthers is a 1968 short documentary film directed by Agnès Varda.
The film focuses on the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California, during protests over the arrest of Black Panther co-founder Huey P. Newton for the murder of police officer John Frey in 1967.
Summary
In the summer of 1968, people arrive in Oakland to protest Huey P. Newton's arrest. Newton is interviewed and talks about his poor treatment while incarcerated and talks about the ideals of the Black Panther movement which includes protecting the black community from the police, informing them of their rights, and taking advantage of license to carry firearm laws in order to arm Panthers against the police.
Other people are interviewed, including Kathleen Cleaver who talks about the natural hair movement and the increasing importance of women in positions of authority in the Black Panther movement. The film ends with Newton's conviction for manslaughter and a hate crime involving two police officers shooting the window of a Black Panther office where Newton's picture had been hung in the front window.
Cast
Bill Brent
Huey P. Newton
Stokely Carmichael
Eldridge Cleaver
Kathleen Cleaver
Development
Varda and her crew shot the film in 1968 during her time in California while her husband Jacques Demy was in Hollywood working on Model Shop.
Release
The film premiered at the 1968 Venice Film Festival.
The Criterion Collection released the film as part of the Eclipse box set Agnès Varda in California in 2015. It was also included in their The Complete Films of Agnès Varda box set released in 2020.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2905436. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1968, 1967, 2015 and 2020.
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This entry incorporates text from “Black Panthers (film)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.