A sold-out crowd of close to 800 music lovers packed the Martha’s Vineyard Performing Arts Center in Oak Bluffs Wednesday night for We Want the Funk!, the newest documentary from acclaimed filmmaker and seasonal Islander Stanley Nelson, Jr., which screened as part of the ongoing Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival.
The audience was ready for a party, and they got one from the minute they stepped into the auditorium, where a DJ was spinning funk classics on the sound system.
The energy in the room remained high throughout the 83-minute documentary, with frequent outbreaks of applause, occasional bursts of laughter and a standing ovation as the credits rolled.
“This is our dream screening,” Mr. Nelson said, thanking the audience as he joined the film’s co-producer Nicole London on stage with moderator Dream Hampton for a post-film discussion.
Mr. Nelson and his wife and business partner, Marcia Smith, arrived on the Vineyard last weekend for a two-month stay at the Nelson family home in Oak Bluffs, where the couple met as summer kids more than half a century ago.
Mr. Nelson’s A Place of Our Own highlighted the Black Oak Bluffs summer community.
— Jeanna Shepard
On Tuesday, the African American Film Festival also hosted a screening of Mr. Nelson’s 2004 film A Place of Our Own, a piercingly intimate portrait of the Black summer community in Oak Bluffs that centered on his own family history.
“It’s the only personal film I’ve ever made. It’s the only personal film I’ll hopefully ever make. It’s a hard film for me to watch because it’s so personal,” Mr. Nelson told the Gazette during a conversation on the screened porch of his Oak Bluffs home that is at the heart of A Place of Our Own.
Made shortly after his mother’s death more than 20 years ago, the film remains a rare, affectionate but clear-eyed look at not only Black Oak Bluffs, but 20th-century Black history itself through the lens of Mr. Nelson’s father, Stanley Earl Nelson, Sr.
“It’s also a film about Martha’s Vineyard, and the beauty of Martha’s Vineyard, in so many ways… and how we grew up here,” Mr. Nelson said. “It was special. It’s always special.”
A Place of Our Own is filled with engaging, often enlightening interviews with longtime Oak Bluffs residents, several of whom have died over the succeeding years. Mr. Nelson goes fishing with feisty nonagenarian Belle Powell, the first wife of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., whose widely-read newspaper column beckoned Black readers to Oak Bluffs in the mid-20th century.
He also interviews his own father, a New York dentist who first brought the family to the Island in the 1950s.
“We didn’t come to Martha’s Vineyard. We came to Oak Bluffs,” Mr. Nelson, Sr. says in the documentary.
The director turns the lens on himself and Ms. Smith as the couple reminisces about their childhood Oak Bluffs summers, which the film also brings to life through home movies of cocktail parties, beach dances and family celebrations.
For people who vacationed in other Island towns during what remained de facto segregation in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, A Place of Our Own opens a window into a parallel but strikingly similar universe of middle-class American life on the other side of a color line.
In contrast to the pensive tone of A Place of Our Own, We Want the Funk! overflows with rhythm, motion and ideas as it celebrates Black culture in one of its most collaborative — and irresistible — manifestations.
“There are no sad funk songs,” says bassist Marcus Miller, one of the many musicians, producers and historians who guide viewers through the 83-minute film.
Other narrators include hip-hop luminary and filmmaker Questlove (Ahmir K. Thompson), gospel star Kirk Franklin and George Clinton, a former Motown musician whose breakout Parliament-Funkadelic bands would make funk a household name.
Instruments in hand, bassist Carlos Alomar and Fred Wesley recount their days with James Brown; Mr. Wesley even plays a few notes from his famous Funky Good Time solo.
Nona Hendryx, a longtime bandmate of Patti LaBelle, recalls their transition from the demure Bluebelles to the hard-edged Labelle, and former P-Funk singer Jeanette Washington Perkins talks about how she balanced the band’s aggressive energy with her own femininity.
In addition to these multi-faceted interviews, Mr. Nelson and his co-producer, Nicole London, unearthed a trove of archival footage for We Want the Funk!, ranging from 1950s white teenagers stiffly dancing the Stroll — a belly-laugh cue for any audience — to extended clips from high-energy concerts by Mr. Brown, Sly and the Family Stone and various manifestations of P-Funk.
A documentarian for nearly 40 years, Mr. Nelson has a deft hand with complex narratives — his many past subjects have included Jonestown, the Black Panthers and the 1971 uprising at Attica State Prison in New York.
“I think one of the things that really makes film happen and makes the audience connect with film is if the audience feels that they’ve made the connection,” he told the Gazette.
“I think that those are special moments, because you’re kind of living inside the film, rather than outside of the film,” Mr. Nelson said.
As the documentary unfolds, so does one’s understanding of funk as a house with many mansions, rather than a musical form with a specific pedigree and timeline.
Funk also gave Black musicians a new and louder voice for expressing their cultural identity and calling for change in a racist society, as first heard in Mr. Brown’s 1968 anthem Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud.
Mr. Nelson and Ms. London even bring in a neuroscientist to explain how dancing to funk music has benefits for the brain, and a fashion historian to talk about Black cultural expression.
During a question and answer session with the audience following Wednesday’s screening, viewers thanked the filmmakers for offering such a rich experience of Black joy amid the adversities of racism.
“This tyrannical foolishness that we have had to deal with over the centuries… I hope this film stirs us up to stand against [it],” one audience member said.
Mr. Nelson and Ms. Smith are also celebrating the 25th anniversary of their independent production company, Firelight Media. Their firm has a nonprofit arm, Firelight Media, that supports filmmaking by Black directors and producers. The couple recently served as executive producers for the new documentary Sun Ra: Do The Impossible, which will screen on the PBS American Masters series in 2026.
The loss of federal funding for public broadcasting is threatening lean times for Mr. Nelson’s business, but he remains focused on his next projects.
“It’s been a weird 18 months because Firelight has finished like five films in the last 18 months. So it’s been kind of crazy, but we’re starting a film on African American art, we’re starting a film on the history of Harlem and a massive project that we’ve been working on for years… on the Atlantic slave trade,” he said.
We Want the Funk! can be screened through the PBS Passport service at pbs.org/independentlens/documentaries/we-want-the-funk/.
A Place of Our Own can be screened through Firelight Films firelightfilms.tv/films/a-place-of-our-own.
