Baadasssss!

Melvin Van Peebles (Mario Van Peebles) was a rising African American star in the late sixties determined to make a film about a new kind of hero. The project, entitled "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song" was dangerous and unprecedented. Every studio turned him down, so decades before anyone heard of independent film, Peebles found his own financing. Despite the hardship of crooked money men (who thought they would be getting an all-black pornographic film), racist police, and a system against them, the film eventually managed to be completed. In the middle of all that is also the story of a man, his wife and his son Mario Van Peebles (Khleo Thomas).