At Berkeley in the Sixties by Jo Freeman

Almost all found the film both educational and entertaining, ranked it better or much better than other classroom films, and thought it the best film on the sixties that they had seen.

I tested the film on a class of undergraduates. It is never boring-an energetic and emotion-charged recreation of and commentary upon events of a generation ago.

It also has sufficient coherence so that a younger audience can understand not only the events but the meaning that those events had for people who lived through those times. Kitchell's film is excellent-rich and rewarding, a warm and compelling story that reveals much about the emotional intensity of the sixties, through the eyes of that era's activists. Although this format is common for documentaries, it takes skillful directing and editing to bring the raw footage and commentary into balance, and Kitchell has happily achieved that result. In this film the interconnections of these events, and others, is shown by mixing documentary film from the sixties with recent recollections of onetime activists. The sixties was remarkable for its frenzied change, and nowhere was the change more frenzied than in the once-quiet university town that became widely known as 'Berserkley.' Along the way we hear the music of San Francisco's hippies, encounter Oakland's Black Panthers, and glimpse the first stirrings of the Women's Movement. His film leads us from the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and its hearings in San Francisco in 1960 through both the Free Speech Movement (FSM) at the University of California in 1964 and the subsequent Vietnam antiwar movement to the explosion over People's Park in 1969. Too young to have been a student protester but old enough to have been shaped by the sixties, he explores what happened in the Bay Area during that decade, largely from the point of view of Berkeley political activists.

Producer/director Mark Kitchell, was born in San Francisco in 1952.

Berkeley in the Sixties is a documentary film about that protest and its origins, conduct, and consequences. No decade produced more protest than the 1960s, and no community in America had a richer involvement in protest than Berkeley, California.

At Berkeley in the Sixties by Jo Freeman