Review by Karl Self

This movie is a fictionalised re-narration of director and co-author Peter Jessen's experience of being dragged to a rural commune by his drop-out mother, and as such it's probably a lot more accurate than a docu-miniseries about the beginnings of the alternative/eco movement -- viz, the Mueslis, as they were so cruelly and accurately dubbed in German. Jessen achieves this by eschewing the two pitfalls of this genre, smarmy those-were-the-days nostalgia and cheap ridicule of a bunch of folks who were, at the very least, active idealists, albeit in often very smelly socks.

(Tidbit information for neophytes: Why didn't they just wash the damn socks? Well, sheep wool was considered to be so vibrantly, wholesomely natural that not only does it clean itself, but you would actually be destroy its magical self-cleaning properties by placing them in the suds. I'm not making this up -- my mother had apparently read the same book, which afforded me olfactory properties that didn't exactly enhance my social standing among my peers.)

The acting is absolutely exceptional down to the minor characters, and overall it's a wonderfully understated movie. It expects you to bring a lot of curiosity and a modicum of sympathy along, though -- if you think hippies are a bunch of commie bleeding-heart tree-huggers then you are probably better off watching something else -- Dallas, for instance.