Ah, the Sixties. Bell-bottoms! LSD! The Rolling Stones! Hendrix! Joplin! This counterculture collection shows how the 60s was often at odds with “peace and love” idealism alongside the ideological rivalry that defined world politics. It was a decade defined by the Civil Rights movement, the escalating Vietnam War, the space race between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., the construction of the Berlin Wall, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, among other geopolitical tensions.

These films trace the contradictions and turmoil of that era, from Jean Rouch’s seminal docufiction film THE HUMAN PYRAMID (1961), to Robert Kramer’s fascinating time capsule of Venezuela FALN (1965), to Shirley’s Clarke’s enduringly provocative PORTRAIT OF JASON (1967), to the self-reflexive DAVID HOLZMAN’S DIARY (1967), to Madeline Anderson’s essential I AM SOMEBODY (1970), which documents the frontlines of the civil rights movement during the 1969 Charleston hospital workers’ strike. Chris Marker’s films GRIN WITHOUT A CAT and LE JOLI MAI (the latter made with Pierre Lhomme just after the end of the Algerian War), track the rise of the New Left in France and the development of socialist movements in Latin America. More than half a century later, these films speak with new urgency to our own moment of civil unrest and upheaval.