Back To The Garden And Other Docos

I have been an avid collector of bits of hippie movie and documentary footage for a while and I have been in contact with Kevin Tomlinson the maker of Back to the Garden a doco which you can watch for free on the web. Here is the link:

http://www.cultureunplugged.com/documentary/watch-online/festival/play/6832

It only streams till December so if you want to watch it get your skates on. The DVD is cheap as chips and can be bought online if you like what you see. Personally I thought it was great and I was left feeling that the doco wasn't long enough and I could quite happily have sat through a lot more of the same. The two that stand out for me were Maeyowa and Onepine two amazing women who were both hugely strong and inspiring. Interestingly I found the male interviewees came off lacking in comparison.

Here is a bit on the Doco written by Kevin to flesh out it's content. I hope you enjoy it.:sunny:

In the sixties they were satirized and vilified for rejecting materialism and corporate culture, in the seventies they stopped the war, started communes, urged back to the land and environmental sustainability...but by the eighties they had virtually disappeared from everyday life. So where did all the "flowers" go? In 1988-nearly twenty years after Woodstock-Seattle filmmaker Kevin Tomlinson asked himself that question while interviewing a group of back-to-the-land hippies at a back-country healing gathering in Washington State. He found small embers of sixties dropouts were still intact and thriving contrary to popular belief and were raising families while refining their hippie idealism-independent of a mass culture that had marginalized and all but forgotten them. Doubtful about how seriously this would be viewed in 1988, the footage sat untouched but not forgotten for almost 20 years. In 2006, Tomlinson took another look. What these off-grid Hippies were talking about in 1988-sustainability, living simpler, sustainable lives, love for the earth, questioning authority, self-reliance, and community responsibility-seemed to be blossoming with incredible force and coming full circle 20 years later as the impact of climate change, an unpopular war, shopping-as-patriotism and the green movement took center stage in mainstream discussion. He set out to find his original subjects again with new questions. Had their radical off-grid lifestyles and ideals survived? Had anyone gone mainstream? What about their children-how did they rebel against the rebel generation? The adventure that followed offers profound, moving insights into one of the most iconic social movements of our time-and speaks to all of us who grew up then or were affected by sixties counterculture. The non-conformist lifestyles of these aging back-to-the-landers and their now-thriving families, firmly insulated from global economic shocks, today looks ahead of its time and wiser than ever. Written by kevin tomlinson

 

Thanks Woodend

 

70 mins eh ?
I'll give it a whirl (and report back later)

 

very inspiring! this may have been the push i needed to pursue the kind of life I really want..

 

it is great to hear that my hip brothers and sisters are alive and thriving to this very day! not that i have been sleeping in a cocoon in some distant la-la land. but there is so much ridicule and bad press these days. over the years i have made it a point to preserve our cultural heritage by whatever works at any given time(regardless of the cost?!). i just love it! it is great to express myself in a matter that really speaks to the invincible aspect o0f life that is hippiedom

 

This was a fantastic video. I have it and keep watching it over and over again. It is so worth seeing. It made me feel so wonderful inside to know that there is still people out there with the true values of Nature, green living and loving everyone. You must see it either by renting or buying. I just love it!

 

i would say this about "the garden": it is all around us. we have never left it. we merely ourselves trashed the place.
and it is entirely up to ourselves, all of us together, by the incentives created by the statistical sum of our priorities, to stop doing so.

 

Greetings. I'll just say upfront that the neo-hippies - I have a hard time relating to them. It's more than long hair and dope, but it's a revolution. Anyone?