USA,
2003, 93 min
Shown in 2003
CREDITS
- dir
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Sam Green, Bill Siegel
- prod
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Sam Green, Carrie Lozano, Bill Siegel
- cam
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Andrew Black, Federico Salsano
- editor
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Sam Green, Dawn Logsdon
- mus
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Dave Cerf, Amy Domingues
- source
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The Free History Project, 1563 Solano Ave. #197, Berkeley, CA 94707. EMAIL: sam@duboce.net.
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COMMENTS
Sam Green, Bill Siegel, Carrie Lozano in person.
OTHER
This devastating documentary could hardly come at a more timely moment, though filmmakers Sam Green and Bill Siegel couldn’t have known that when they started the film. Timely or not, they’ve taken on a big, prickly historical subject and captured its complexity with an immediacy that is both breathtaking and heartbreaking. Then (the late ’60s and early ’70s) and now, massive gatherings gridlock the streets of major cities, protesting an inexplicable war in a faraway country and the President who got us there; terrorists on U.S. soil blow up buildings and demand the overthrow of the government and the country divides itself into hawks and doves. The difference, of course, is that the radical terrorist organization called the Weather Underground was made up of young (mostly) middle-class white Americans, college students whose angry idealism drove them to desperate, violent acts to incite revolution. A thrilling mix of vintage footage and penetrating interviews with ex-Weathermen (and women)—some who have moved on to normal lives as teachers and other “straight” jobs, others serving life sentences in prison, most of them haunted by, proud of and sharply thoughtful about their days as revolutionaries and lonely fugitives—The Weather Underground is powerful, essential history for our times.
—Tod Booth
FACTOID #10
In 1960, Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, which has inspired many women to jump into fountains, was pulled from the San Francisco International Film Festival’s program by the distributor and replaced with Roberto Rossellini’s Night over Rome.
