The Strawberry Statement

Simon is on the university rowing team. An occupation starts on campus: students have taken the administration building, protesting the university's ties to the military and what it is doing to the neighbourhood. Simon goes in first out of curiosity and then because he has seen Linda. He does not quite know the slogans or the issue, and he stays. Days pass, the occupation grows, the police mass outside. Over that week Simon works out what he is there for. In the end the batons coming through the door do not ask anyone what they think. Stuart Hagmann directs; a hundred and nine minutes, with Bruce Davison as Simon and Kim Darby as Linda. It is adapted from the journal James Simon Kunen kept during the 1968 occupation at Columbia. It won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1970.