JONESTOWN: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF PEOPLES TEMPLE

Viewed from above on November 19, 1978, Jonestown, Guyana was an odd, almost festive patchwork of bright colors. But upon closer scrutiny, the colors resolved into the carnage of the day before, bodies in bright summer clothing lined up face-down on the ground, contorted and grotesque.

Award-winning director Stanley Nelson's remarkably affecting documentary attaches faces and histories to these anonymous remains. Rare personal video and photographs taken by survivors and defectors, combined with their often-intimate reminiscences, humanize the "family members" of Peoples Temple and illuminate the motivations that led them to Jonestown.

Perhaps the most powerful revelation in the film is that approximately eighty percent of Jones' congregrants were African-American. The "theology" of the Peoples Temple capitalized on the disappointed promise of the activist 1960s, appealing to people compelled by that decade's driving principles of social change.

Much of the insight of the documentary comes from its focus on how Jones exploited these unrealized ideals of civil rights and America's vexed racial history. Driven by his own outsider perspective, forged by an impoverished childhood in a dysfunctional family, Jones surrounded himself with idealistic but often disempowered people-minorities, the poor, the elderly-whose insecurity he could easily exploit.

Toward the end of the film, chilling audio of Jones threatening and manipulating his followers during the last days and in the final minutes of the commune reveals a Jonestown far more prison than church, erasing much of the mystery, but only compounding the sense of disturbance and tragedy.

-Caroline Small

DIRECTOR BIO
Stanley Nelson, a 2002 MacArthur "Genius" Fellow, is an award-winning filmmaker best known for his groundbreaking historical documentaries that illuminate critical but overlooked history. For his 2003 film, THE MURDER OF EMMETT TILL, Nelson won a Primetime Emmy; the Special Jury Prize at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival; an International Documentary Association award; and the George Foster Peabody award. His 2004 film, A PLACE OF OUR OWN, a semi-autobiographical look at the African-American middle-class, screened in the Sundance Film Festival. Nelson is the Executive Producer of Firelight Media, a non-profit documentary production company dedicated to giving a voice to people and issues that are marginalized in popular culture.

Print Source:
Marcia Smith, Firelight Media
260 10th Street #636
Berkeley, CA 94710
510.704.9200
info@firelightmedia.org

6/17 at 7:45 PM

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