Tag Archives: Hippy

Aquarius: Dreamers, Tree-Huggers and Radical Ratbags

When thousands of young people travelled the back roads of Northern New South Wales 50 years ago to camp and explore a new way of living at Nimbin Aquarius Festival something unexpected happened amongst all the bliss, drugs and revolutionary zeal.

In May 1973, 10,000 artists, activists, hippies, radical students, gurus and visionaries descended on a small dairy town for 10 days of social and cultural exploration that changed a generation.

Those 10 days birthed an irrepressible movement and a manifesto for sustainable change. Aquarius is a film about the people and the power of change, of unintended consequences and the radical wisdom that reaches down through generations today.

How Ping Pong Saved the World

How Ping-Pong Saved the World recounts the events of April 1971 when a U.S. Table Tennis team became the first Americans allowed to enter communist China in decades. Their invitation paved the way for President Nixon’s landmark visit just eight months later.

For eights days, 15 unlikely American Ping-Pong playing diplomats discovered the little known world behind the Bamboo Curtain. These unlikely diplomats were about to reshape history and in the process make a breakthrough of historic proportions and in doing so, foster the beginning of the end of the cold war.

Ping-Pong soon became a metaphor for the on-going difficult relations between the United States and China – two ideological opposites on the brink of detente. ‘Ping-Pong Diplomacy’ marked the beginning of a new relationship between the United States and the People’s Republic of China; one that over the next 40 years would evolve into the world’s most important bilateral alliance.

Quadrangle

Quadrangle is an unconventional documentary about two “conventional” couples that swapped partners and lived in a group marriage in the early 1970s. Coming out of the era of free love, and struggling with the monotony of marriage and suburban life, Deanna and Paul, began swapping partners with another middle class married couple. This four-way affair became a domestic living experiment when the two couples moved into one home, along with their children. While their individual marriages were failing, they found that together they were happy and thought they had discovered an alternative to divorce – a brave new world that would pave the way for how couples would live in the future. Instead it unraveled. Both couples divorced and married their foursome partners, but they could never truly separate because they were bound by the children they shared.

This film examines the story of the group marriage as told by Deanna and Paul in the present. They are forty years older and estranged, and through seperate interviews a simulated conversation takes place as they recount their stories. How do we grapple with marriage, monogamy, and desire? What happens when you challenge the boundaries of social convention? And what, if anything, did we learn from all that sixties-inspired experimentation?

The Leftovers

A film about five people who attempt to travel 2000km in a vegetable oil powered van… Living on nothing but waste.

The Leftovers is a road trip adventure about people who eat trash. Meet Mykel and Paul, two experienced Dumpster Divers as they embark on a journey down the east coast of Australia. Wanting to make a statement about our over consuming society, they challenge themselves to live on nothing but waste and so leaving their money behind, they power their van with waste vegetable oil and eat out of bins along the way.

Also along for the ride they bring three brave new apprentices to the world of Dumpster Diving. Nick from Scotland who’s in for the thrill, Sofia an international student from Sweden who wants to see the real Australia and Krystal who just wants to get out of Brisbane!

Will their first adrenalin-pumping dive into dumpster living be remembered as the dawn of a new age or the holiday from hell?!

Diary of a Times Square Thief

Diary of a Times Square Thief documents the search for the writer of a mysterious diary. This manuscript describes the adventures of a young man who left the Midwest to go to New York and fulfil his dream of becoming a writer and his subsequent decline. The diary, which the filmmaker found on EBay, gives a frank and confronting account of the author’s downfall before ending abruptly, the last pages being cut out with a knife.

As director Bense attempts to track down the characters described in the diary, a picture emerges of a lost generation – the underbelly of New York’s flophouse underclass which is both grim and poetic. Diary of a Times Square Thief paints a vivid picture of the world famous Times Square area when it was still a dramatic and brutal urban jungle. Weaving intimate portraits of some of the colourful characters described in the diary, the fate of the talented but failed author emerges, as does the value of chasing dreams.