For a new film on Vermont’s 1960s counterculture, it’s been a long strange trip to the screen

A half-century after its source material was optioned by Robert Redford, the documentary “Far Out: Life On & After the Commune” revisits how the back-to-the-land movement changed the state then and now.

By Kevin O'Connor
September 1, 2024, 7:57 am

[...]

Mungo would move to California, where he’s now 78, retired and, according to friends, living quietly out of the public spotlight. Light, for his part, has spent decades making indie documentaries about everything from the plight of Vietnam veterans to the fight against nuclear power to, premiering Sept. 7, what he calls “this long-delayed opus.”

“Far Out: Life On & After the Commune” tells the true story of a group of hippies who bought properties in Guilford and nearby Montague, Massachusetts, only to face challenges while sowing the seeds of surprisingly lasting change.

[...]

Many longtime locals still remember the newcomers weeding naked. But the documentary reveals the commune wasn’t always the Garden of Eden. When Mungo revealed his sexuality, “the hippies were not necessarily accepting of this gay thing,” he says in the film. Women recount feeling relegated to the kitchen despite the feminist movement, while their children ricocheted in different directions.

[...]

Commune residents would go on to protest the 1970s development of nuclear power locally and nationally. By 1979, a few teamed with such stars as Jackson Browne, Graham Nash and Bonnie Raitt to produce a week of sold-out “No Nukes” concerts at New York’s Madison Square Garden and a culminating 200,000-person rally featuring Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden and Ralph Nader at nearby Battery Park.

[...]



Ray Mungo (left) is pictured on the cover of his 1970 book “Famous Long Ago: My Life and Hard Times with Liberation News Service.”