FAR OUT: Life On & After the Commune Film Screening and Discussion

Film About Local Communes to Play at Shea in Turners Falls Far Out: Life On & After the Commune, an 85 minute documentary tells the story of two rural New England communal farms. The screening will include a discussion with director Charles Light; Sam Lovejoy, Montague Farm commune member and anti-nuclear activist; and Verandah Porche, poet and long time member of the Packer Corners farm. The film’s story begins in the summer of 1968, in the middle of a left wing faction fight, when a group of radical journalists from Liberation News Service (LNS) left New York City for the country. They founded two communes–at Packer Corners in Guilford, VT and in Montague, MA. After leaving the city and turning away from national politics, the group of mostly young city slickers became pioneers in the back-to-the-land and organic farming movement. With the help of their neighbors, they spent the first five years learning rudimentary agricultural skills as well as how to live and work with each other as a communal family. In 1973 when the local utility proposed a giant twin nuclear plant four miles from the Montague Farm, they became active opponents. In a dramatic act of civil disobedience, Sam Lovejoy, from the Montague Farm, toppled a 500-foot weather tower on the planned nuclear site. He turned himself in, and after a trial where he represented himself and drew national attention, was acquitted. Subsequently, the group became leaders in the burgeoning No Nukes movement–from the battles over the Seabrook nuclear plant to Diablo Canyon in California and scores of reactor sites in between. In 1979, they teamed up with Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, John Hall, Graham Nash and other committed rock stars to help produce five nights of sold out concerts at Madison Square Garden and a 250,000-person rally in New York City. Aside from original music, composed and performed by Patty Carpenter and the Dysfunctional Family Jazz Band, Far Out includes music from Country Joe McDonald, Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, Graham Nash, John Hall, Jesse Colin Young, James Taylor, Carly Simon, Steve Stills, Pete Seeger and others. The Packer Corners farm also returned to politics, aiding in the anti-nuclear fight, but also by engaging with the local community through producing outdoor plays such as Midsummer Night’s Dream, Alice in Wonderland, and The Tempest. Fresh from a month long run at the Latchis Theater in Brattleboro which set a 25 year record for a single night sales at over 500 and came in second to only Barbie, in the past five years, for total ticket sales, Far Out played for over a month in Brattleboro. It played to a sold out house at the Newburyport Film Festival where it was awarded Best New England Feature and theatrical showings have taken place in Montpelier and Burlington in Vermont; Greenfield, Massachusetts and Peterboro and Keene,New Hampshire. Theatrical shows will be taking place in Turners Falls and Lexington, Massachusetts as well as Hartford, CT, Kittery, ME and Bellows Falls, VT. Blending contemporary interviews and a remarkable trove of original archival footage, Far Out is lively, humorous, inspiring and irreverent. The point of view is honest rather than nostalgic. The film is vital, telling the history but hewing to the universal themes of how we grapple--over a lifetime--with politics, relationships, morality, spirituality, civic engagement and finding our home. The movie takes advantage of an exceptional collection of archival material, much of it produced by commune members themselves. Producers Charles Light and Daniel Keller were members of the community and filmed the nuclear battles–in titles such as Lovejoy’s Nuclear War, The Last Resort and Save the Planet–as well as many hours of daily life at the farms. Far Out also uses material from other professional filmmakers, notably Alan Dater and John Scagliotti’s The Stuff of Dreams, Robbie Leppzer’s, Seabrook ’77, Nora Jacobson and Alan Dater’s, The Vermont Movie, and Barbara Kopple and Danny Goldberg’s, No Nukes. Far Out documents communal life in the ‘70s with footage shot by Harry Saxman and Don McLean and photos by Peter Simon and others. Books by commune members (among the many: Ray Mungo's, Famous Long Ago and Total Loss Farm; Steve Diamond's What the Trees Said; Verandah Porche’s, The Body’s Symmetry; Harvey Wasserman’s, History of the US; Peter Gould’s Burnt Toast; Tom Fels, Farm Friends; Marty Jezeers, The Dark Ages; and Verandah and Patty Carpenter’s music album, Come Over as well as the group's Home Comfort), and the poetry, visual art, plays and music that the farms produced adds detail. The film traces fifty years in the lives of this group of New England writers, activists and artists. It conveys not only how these “hippies” transformed Vermont and western Massachusetts, but also how rural life and the people they met changed them.