Today, film-maker Allen Hughes is sitting in the California sunshine with the San Gabriel Mountains behind him and a cigar – or maybe a Snoop Dogg-style blunt? – in his hand. “Pardon my cigar,” he says politely, after sparking up. “I haven’t had a smoke all weekend.”
At 51, Hughes has emerged from a wild youth in the 90s hip-hop scene and arrived at this more comfortable vantage point for reflection. Not coincidentally, this privilege of ageing is also a sub-theme of his new documentary series, Dear Mama, about the rapper and Black activist icon Tupac Shakur, whose own life was cut painfully short in 1996. With extraordinary access – there are interviews with family members and hip-hop superstars from Dr Dre to Eminem, hand-scrawled teenage poetry from his diaries and even video footage of his courtroom depositions – the documentary interweaves the rapper’s meteoric rise with the revolutionary struggles of his Black Panther mother two decades before.
