In 1970, a ragtag caravan of colorfully painted school buses filled with a few hundred hippies left San Francisco on a quest to utopia. The group ended up in Summertown, Tenn., on a 1,050-acre backwoods parcel.
Thus The Farm was born. By 1980, it had become the largest commune in America.
The story of starry-eyed, idealistic young adults seeking an alternative, back-to-the-earth lifestyle has been told many times over. But what about their children? What was it like to grow up on a commune, and how did they fare?
“American Commune” tells their story. The documentary by sisters Nadine Mundo and Rena Mundo Croshere has its U.S. premiere July 26 in the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.
The sisters, now residents of New York City, return to The Farm for a large reunion. It’s their first time back since leaving in 1985 (their parents split; their brother, Miguel, went with their father and they went with their mother), and they are anxious.
“For years, we’ve kept that part of our childhood a secret,” Nadine shares on the bus ride down to Tennessee. Her emotions quickly rise to the surface as she visits The Farm and confronts her past.
The Mundo sisters are not the only ones returning with mixed emotions. The film introduces us to a myriad of former Farmers — one young woman shakes visibly as she discusses her hatred for the commune — but even she eventually warms to the place she once lived and the people who were her extended family.
As the visitors become reacquainted in group circles and private conversations, as they rediscover old friends and recall both the struggle and the glory of days gone by, warm and fuzzy overtakes disquiet.
“We ran around in huge kid herds, and I remember never wanting the day to end,” Nadine remembers.
Her mother, father and brother also attend and reminisce with frank honesty.
The mom, Jan, grew up in a Conservative Jewish home outside Beverly Hills and ditched U.C. Berkeley to hang out in the Haight-Ashbury. She met her future husband, Jose Mundo, who is Puerto Rican, in San Francisco, where both attended a weekly class led by guru Stephen Gaskin. Gaskin became the driving force behind The Farm, and its spiritual leader. Now aging and not looking so authoritative, we meet him as the Mundo sisters ask questions they never dared voice as youngsters.
In its heyday, The Farm hosted some 1,200 residents, including several hundred children.
“We were just basically having a good time, living the dream,” says Jose Mundo.
The film mixes vintage film footage from back in the day — starting with long-haired men and women seated cross-legged in Gaskin’s class, to the iconic Walter Cronkite reporting on their cross-country journey, to scenes of bare-chested men and sweating women harvesting sorghum as they try to make a go of it as a self-sufficient, agricultural community.
Viewers of a certain generation will laugh and sympathize with their contemporaries’ naivete, while younger viewers might roll their eyes (though surely will find some appeal in the counterculture). Music from the era adds an evocative layer.
“American Commune” takes an honest look at past and present, for better or worse.
When the Mundo family (along with many others) left The Farm for good, it was the children who faced the toughest adjustment. While it was not difficult to get used to indoor plumbing, heating and a pantry full of food, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance — what was that?
The Farm still exists (though residents today call it “an intentional community”) and is recognized as a pioneer in spiritual midwifery and organic farming, and for its efforts to help the disadvantaged in the U.S. and abroad through its nonprofit, Plenty.
“American Commune,” 8:55 p.m. July 26 at the Castro in S.F., 2 p.m. Aug. 10 at the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael, 6:40 p.m. Aug. 11 at the Grand Lake in Oakland. The directors will be present at the Castro screening. (Unrated, 90 minutes)