“Dancing in the Street”, 15.2 – 16.5-2026

Black Panthers is a 1968 short documentary film directed by Agnès Varda

Agnès Varda (1928–2019)
Agnès Varda was a French filmmaker, artist and photographer born in Brussels. She moved with her family to Sète, in the south of France, in 1940, where the family lived on a boat. She studied at the Sorbonne in Paris. Her films launched the French Nouvelle Vague, focusing on socio-political resistance movements among the young post-war generation. Her first film, La Pointe Courte, was made in 1955 and shot in Sète about the growing resistance to the social deprivation of fishermen. Since then, she has always shot her films on location, both in homes and on the street, played by residents and bystanders, friends and strangers, all non-professional actors.
In the autumn of 1967, AV travelled to San Francisco, where her uncle, the painter Jean Varda, lived on a houseboat and was known and loved by the hippie community. She made a film about him, Uncle Yanko. AV then travelled to Oakland, where the Black Panther Party had been founded the previous year on 15 October 1966 by Huey Newton (1942-1989) and Bobby Seale (1936). A black party focused on the collective self-defence of the black community against systematic, brutal police violence.
In Oakland, AV encounters an extremely tense situation. On 28 October, a police officer was killed during the arrest of Huey Newton and his friend. The subsequent arrest of Huey Newton triggers a massive protest by the black community.