Commune (20th Anniversary Restoration)

In 1968, a group of American dissidents move to the remote woods of Northern California to create a new, utopian society. They struggle with surviving the winter, an invading cult, and their wildly varying ideas of what utopia might really be.

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!”