This festival business is becoming a psychedelic concentration camp.
The Isle of Wight Festival was one of the last gasps of the 1960s. The music festival took place in August 1970 on an island off the south coast of England that could only be reached by boat. More than 600,000 people attended the festival, only one tenth of them actually paying the admission price. Lerner’s film focuses on the conflict between the festival promoters and the crowd who refused to pay and tried to break through the barricades. Then of course there were the legendary performances by such greats as Jimi Hendrix (just a few weeks before his death), The Doors (one year before the death of Jim Morrison), The Who, Joni Mitchell, Miles Davis, The Moody Blues, Joan Baez, Leonard Cohen and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Message to Love captures a crucial moment in history: the end of the hippie dream and the beginnings of the depression that the 1970s would bring.
Murray Lerner, US, 2011, 107'
© BBC / Sony Music Entertainment
