Either way, Frances Dixon wasn’t too rattled. “OK. Try it,” she recalls replying in a new documentary about women in the Seattle Black Panther Party. Composed of five interviews, Keepers of the Dream: Seattle Women Black Panthers zooms in on the personal narratives of the Seattle women in the party. The film, produced and directed by local filmmakers Tajuan LaBee and Patricia Boiko, premieres Friday to a sold-out audience at Northwest Film Forum. (An added screening will be held Feb. 20.)

Seattle alt-jazz diva SassyBlack (aka Catherine Harris-White) composed the documentary’s musical heartbeat, a groovy, horn-laced score that weaves through the narrative. I’m a queen of the scene, Harris-White sings as the camera pans to the powder blue Central District house where the Dixon brothers and others held the Seattle Black Panther Party chapter’s first organizational meeting (and where Frances Dixon still lives). And I mean business, SassyBlack continues.

“Black Panther Mom” Frances Dixon interviewed in her home. Her sons Elmer and Aaron Dixon helped found the Seattle chapter of the Black Panthers for Self-Defense in 1968. (Film still from the documentary by Patricia Boiko/Tajuan LaBee)

Such determination is precisely what emerges from the accounts of the five women featured in Keepers of the Dream: Dixon, a “Black Panther Mom,” and Black Panthers Phyllis Noble Mobley, Vanetta Molson-Turner, Youlanda Givens and Winona Hollins-Hauge.

Mobley was only 15 when she joined the Black Panther Party in Seattle. She sold Black Panther newspapers and collected donations for the Panthers’ free breakfast program. Givens was involved in the breakfast program too, purchasing, cooking and serving food, and collected donations as well. As a recent Seattle Central grad, Molson-Turner was energized by the Panthers’ message of revolution and change, and moved into the party’s headquarters. To transport supplies to the Panthers’ first free health clinic in Seattle, she had to first step over the protective sandbags that lined the interior of the headquarters.