Back in 1973, director Roviros Manthoulis released a documentary titled The Blues Under the Skin which featured quite a number of the most influential blues artists of the last century, including B.B. King, Buddy Guy, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, Mance Lipscomb, Bukka White, and Roosevelt Sykes.
The film never received a theatrical release in the United States and has existed for 50 years as a piece of lost media available only to the most diligent scholars and archivists who could track down a copy. But following a new 2K restoration, Kino Lorber is bringing the film to theaters this summer for a proper release, set for July 12, 2024.
As Indie Wire notes, The Blues Under the Skin explored the origins of the blues in the Mississippi Delta and the ways that the genre was inextricably linked to the institutions of slavery and segregation before entering mainstream American culture.
Synopsis
From the simple story of love and misery of a young couple from the Harlem ghetto to meetings with twelve great blues singers (BB King, Mance Lipscomb, Robert Pete Williams, Roosevelt Sykes), filmed in their social milieu.
About Roviros Manthoulis
Born in Athens in 1929, Roviros Manthoulis studied Political Science before going to New York to study Theatre, Film, Art History and International Relations. Returning to his homeland, he shot what’s seen as the first film about reality in Greece, Leucada, the Island of the Poets (1958). In 1966, he made Face to Face, which examines the rise of fascism in Greece. A year later, he attended its screening at the Hyères Festival. On the day the film was shown, the Colonels seized power in Athens. Since it was impossible for him to return home, he settled first in Switzerland and then moved to Paris. His work now includes more than a hundred films, dramas and documentaries, personal work and commissioned movies for television and cinema.
