The Counterculture, which began its journey in the early 1960s in the United States, has undoubtedly been the most important social and cultural movement of the second half of the 20th century. Its postulates penetrated Western societies, more deeply than is usually admitted, and today its influence, for better or for worse, is indisputable. It was a humanist renaissance that reacted against a depersonalizing modernity and proposed a return to the inner world and a new spirituality, free and outside the Western canons. The essence of this transversal movement of spiritual regeneration was the attempt to transform, not social structures, like other currents, but the consciousness of the individual, and the trigger of this inner transformation were psychedelic drugs, converted into a kind of sacraments of a new mysterious cult and the backbone of the initiatory process.
In 1963 a small group of friends in Orange County, Southern California, who had tried LSD, drunk with contagious optimism, created «The Brotherhood of Eternal Love» to spread LSD and culture psychedelic and thus change the world by overcoming prevailing materialism and violence. Throughout the decade his influence grew exponentially. He also added Timothy Leary, the professor of psychotherapy at Harvard who had spread LSD among his students and who was now threatening to run for governor of California. In 1970 the Brotherhood was the most important international psychedelic distribution organization and its star product was Orange Sunshine, probably the most famous LSD in history. The American administration did not stand idly by, Richard Nixon declared drugs America’s public enemy number 1 and put the Brotherhood in the crosshairs of all the repressive forces of the state…
This fabulous documentary, which follows like a fast-paced adventure film, tells his whole story. A story that has never been told before.
Illegal drugs are still a taboo subject, but aside from the judgment we make of them today, we cannot face the history of that time, with a minimum of rigor, without taking them into account.
El passo was the premiere in Spain of Orange Sunshine, and we had the privilege of having the director, William A. Kirkley, who came expressly from Los Angeles to present it.
Data sheet
Title: Orange Sunshine
Director: William A. Kirkley
Production: William A. Krikley, Andrew Fuller, Debra Manisalco
Editing: Chris Catanach
Director of photography: Rudiger Barth
Music: Matt Costa
Year: 2016
Duration: 94 min.