Independent Lens
The Trials of Muhammad Ali
Muhammad Ali's exile years when he was banned from boxing found him in the crosshairs of conflicts concerning race, religion, and wartime dissent.
The Weather Underground
Privileged youth who turned to systematic violence in an effort to stop the Vietnam War and start a revolution face the past.
- Series
- Independent Lens
- Premiere Date
- April 27, 2004
- Length
- 90 minutes
- Funding Initiative
- Open Call
Producer/Director
Sam Green
Sam Green received his master's degree in journalism from the University of California at Berkeley, where he studied documentary film with acclaimed filmmaker Marlon Riggs. His documentary The Rainbow Man/John 3:16 premiered at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival and screened at festivals worldwide, winning Grand Prize at the U.S.A. Film Festival in… Show more
Director
Bill Siegel
Bill Siegel has more than 20 years of experience in documentary filmmaking and education. He co-directed the Academy Award-nominated documentary The Weather Underground; was a researcher on the documentary films Muhammad Ali: The Whole Story and Hoop Dreams; and a writer on One Love, a documentary on the cultural history of basketball by Leon Gast (When We Were Kings).… Show more
- Other ITVS Films
- The Trials of Muhammad Ali
Producer
Carrie Lozano
Carrie Lozano is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and journalist. She is currently director of the IDA's Enterprise Documentary and Pare Lorentz funds. In addition, she is a lecturer at U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.
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The Film
In October 1969, hundreds of young people wielding lead pipes and clad in football helmets marched through an upscale Chicago shopping district, pummeling parked cars and smashing shop windows. Thus began the “Days of Rage,” the first demonstration of the Weathermen, later known as the Weather Underground. Outraged by the Vietnam War and racism in America, this group of former student radicals waged a low-level war against the United States government through much of the 1970s, bombing the Capitol building, breaking Timothy Leary out of prison and finally evading the FBI by going into hiding. In The Weather Underground, former Weathermen speak frankly about the idealist passions and trajectories that transformed them from college activists into the FBI’s Most Wanted.
The Weather Underground emerged when Dohrn and a group of fellow University of Chicago students split with the campus-run Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, because they disagreed with the SDS’s peaceful protest tactics against the Vietnam War. Dubbing itself the Weathermen, this new organization took its name from a line in Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” — “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” — and within months had set off bombs at the National Guard headquarters and set in motion plans to bomb targets across the country that it considered emblematic of the worldwide violence sanctioned by the U.S. government.
Using extensive archival material such as photographs, film footage and FBI documents, The Weather Underground chronicles the Weathermen’s public rise and fall and offers a rare insider look into the group’s private conflicts. Fueled by righteous anger, these white, middle-class students were also widely criticized for their controversial — some say misguided — politics. Ultimately, the Weathermen's carefully organized, clandestine network managed to successfully dodge the FBI for years, although the group's members would eventually reemerge to life in a country that was dramatically different than the one they had hoped their efforts would inspire.
