The Williams Lake Transition Town group is hosting a film and discussion night this Monday, Oct. 21, not Wednesday as announced earlier.
The film is called Back to the Garden — Flower Power Comes Full Circle, and will be begin with a discussion at 6:30 p.m. and the film starting at 7 p.m., says event spokesperson Richard Case.
In the 1960s flower children were satirized and vilified for rejecting materialism and corporate culture, says the film synopsis.
In the 1970s they stopped the war, started communes, urged back to the land and environmental sustainability, but by the 1980s they had virtually disappeared from everyday life.
So where did all the “flowers” go?
In 1988, nearly 20 years 20 years after Woodstock-Seattle filmmaker Kevin Tomlinson asked himself that question while interviewing a group of back-to-the-land hippies at a back-country healing gathering in Washington State.
He found small embers of 1960s dropouts were still intact and thriving contrary to popular belief and were raising families while refining their hippie idealism-independent of a mass culture that had marginalized and all but forgotten them.
“Come browse our lending library, share snacks, and join in the discussion,” Case says in inviting the community to the event.
Doubtful about how seriously this would be viewed in 1988, the footage sat untouched but not forgotten for almost 20 years.
In 2006, Tomlinson took another look.
What these off-grid Hippies were talking about in 1988-sustainability, living simpler, sustainable lives, love for the earth, questioning authority, self-reliance, and community responsibility-seemed to be blossoming with incredible force.
The movement is coming full circle 20 years later as the impact of climate change, and unpopular war, shopping-as-patriotism and the green movement took centre stage in mainstream discussion.
He set out to find his original subjects again with new questions.
Had their radical off-grid lifestyles and ideals survived? Had anyone gone mainstream?
What about their children-how did they rebel against the rebel generation?