Berkeley in the Sixties

Today Lucas and I watched 'Berkeley in the Sixties' - it was played in one of the rooms of the church I usually go to on Sunday, i.e. the Newman Catholic Center. We've been living in this town for more than three months and we can feel its nice atmosphere of cafes, walks, music, but it's hard to understand nowadays what made it so famous fifty years ago. So, when I saw that they were showing this documentary, we were both interested in going.
Both of us really liked this documentary. It's really well done, it shows people and facts from the Free Speech Movement, the Anti War Movement, the Black Panthers, the founding of the People's Park and the disastrous events occurring afterwards.. With scenes from the time and interviews to people who lived those events. Seeing so many people fighting for a common cause touched me, even though they did it in different ways. The documentary shows very clearly that there were different opinions about how to bring the cause to the attention of the public. But all the people agreed that there was something to do to improve the world - starting from the terrible injustice of the war, to the discrimination against black people and women.. I'd really like to see something like this happen again. There would be so much to be upset about. Some causes are so obviously right, such as the fight against the use of torture, which the same country I'm living in and I'm getting to love uses as common practice towards whoever can be declared 'enemy combatant'!

In any case, I strongly recommend watching this movie. I also found this really interesting website: it's a photographic tour of Berkeley in 1995, taken by a person who lived the Sixties in this town and went looking for traces from the past.