Commune

In 1968 Elsa and Richard Marley founded a communal living settlement called Black Bear in a remote corner of northern California, under the motto of free land for free people. The documentary tells the story of that community. Through archive footage and interviews with people who lived there, it shows how communal living actually worked: the division of labour, the care of children, money and how decisions were made. The community also came through surveillance by the FBI and a period of cult leadership. The account declares the community neither a success nor a failure; it counts up both what the experiment cost and what it managed. Peter Coyote narrated Jonathan Berman’s seventy eight minute American documentary, completed in 2005.