Mario Van Peebles has a plan to stick it to The Man and put the 'hood into Hollywood in this biopic/remake/pastiche of his daddy Melvin's 1971 cult classic Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, the down'n'dirty blaxploitation cousin of Shaft that had Black Panthers queuing round the block for tickets in the early '70s.
Chronicling his father's attempts to get Sweetback off the ground, Mario gets all Oedipal by playing his old man himself as he writes, directs and acts in the seminal ghetto movie about a black pornstar on the run after killing two white cops. Recreating key scenes from Sweetback and its tortuous production history - Van Peebles Senior lost everything, including an eye, trying to get the film made - Mario brilliantly illuminates a key moment in African-American pop culture.
The mother of all Making Ofs, it's cinema history turned back into cinema: sweet.
