COMMUNE at Savor Cinema

Date & Time

Price $10 - $12

Venue Savor Cinema
503 SE 6 Street
Fort Lauderdale, FL 33301 GET DIRECTIONS

Phone Number 954.525.3456

SYNOPSIS
During the radical fervor of the early 1970s, utopian communities dotted the American landscape. They aimed to reshape the world with “free love” and common property, and they excited controversy and fear amongst citizens across the country. Though the idea of communes is now often relegated to a naïve past, the film discovers a successful and lasting, if controversial, legacy at the influential Black Bear Ranch, in Siskiyou County, California.

Premised on the idea of “Free Land for Free People,” and financed by the largesse of Hollywood rock stars, the founders of Black Bear bought land deep in the wilderness and raised a rough-hewn homestead. Over the years, hundreds would join the community, and life would be complicated by conflicts about the role of women, childrearing, proper communalist behavior, the FBI, and most traumatically, a child-snatching cult. With archival footage from the early days, and the present-day views of Black Bear members and their offspring, “Commune” is a revealing look at how our most basic choices about family, work, and the nature of our relationships send powerful and lasting shock waves through the fabric of society. Featuring herbalist Michael Tierra, who is credited with rediscovering echinacea; internationally renowned painter Elsa Marley; and actor Peter Coyote.

2025 Directors Note
With the very real modern struggles of Trump’s America, people are seeking solutions of every kind to an increasing authoritarianism. As feminist activist Carol Hanisch wrote in 1969, “the personal is political,” and nothing is more personal than how we live and the who, what, and where of the place we call home. We present a new, up-resed version of the first modern documentary to deal with communal living and cults, subjects which have skyrocketed in popularity over the past years. In our modern high-tech world, where an Amazon delivery is moments away and there’s less need to leave our dwellings, we face a plague of loneliness. Is coming together the cure? Or perhaps, as Sartre wrote “hell is—other people!”