PBS and American Experience will celebrate half a century since the first Woodstock festival in a brand new feature-length documentary premiering in mid-2019.
Woodstock will coincide with the 50 year anniversary of the festival and explore how the counterculture movement’s concepts of peace and love was put to the test with the miserable conditions concert-goers faced.
In August 1969, 500,000 people from all over the United States flocked to a dairy farm in upstate New York for a three day festival of unprecedented influence.
Woodstock will explore not only the festival but will examine the tumultuous events of the decade that lead up to those three historic days. America was deeply divided by Vietnam, and racial, sexual and generational politics were shifting the cultural climate of the entire Western world.
Directed by Barak Goodman, who is best known for his previous documentaries Scottsboro: An American Tragedy (2000) and Oklahoma City (2017), the documentary will examine Woodstock from the ground up, focusing on the audience members and their experiences of the festival.
Speaking on the documentary, American Experience executive producer Mark Samels shared:
“By focusing on individuals – from concert goers to security guards to performers to local residents – Woodstock expands our understanding of the event as not only an unparalleled musical milestone, but a once-in-a-century cultural phenomena that served as a coda to the sixties and a harbinger of the decades to come.”
While the premiere date is yet to be announced, PBS has said that the documentary is set to air in the summer of 2019 in the United States. Given they’re celebrating an anniversary… our hot guess is August.
Via discovermusic.
