Lucio
Awards and festivals: Goya Awards 2008 nomination
There are plenty of anarchists in the world. Many have committed robbery or smuggling for their cause. Fewer have discussed strategies with Che Guevara or saved the skin of Eldridge Cleaver – the leader of the Black Panthers. There is only one who has done all that, and also brought to its knees the most powerful bank on the planet by forging travellers cheques, without missing a single day of work in his construction job. He is Lucio Urtubia, from a tiny village in Navarra in North of Spain. The press called him “the good bandit”, or the “Basque Zorro”. He managed to swindle 25 million dollars from the First National Bank (now Citibank), to later invest the money in causes he believed in. Miraculously, he spent no more than a few months in jail throughout his “career”.
Salvador
Anarchism Revisited: Voices and Visions
In 1979, Pacific Street Films took off on a rambling cross-country trip, funded, ironically, by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The mission was to search out any evidence of anarchist activity in communities as rural as Atkins Bay, Maine, and as cosmopolitan as San Francisco.
Along the way a strange cast of characters emerged; some calling themselves “anarchist,” others, eschewing the label, but nonetheless calling themselves “anti-authoritarian,” or “individualist.” In fact, the premise of the documentary was that Americans, inherently, embody anarchist principles, an experience far different then their European counterparts. The filmmakers stumbled upon Mildred Loomis, 80-years-old and still advocating back to the land individualism; Kenneth Rexroth, a father of the San Francisco beat scene; and the remarkable Republican-turned-Anarchist, Karl Hess, pursued to the end by the IRS for his refusal to pay taxes.
Growing up with Paul Goodman
Growing Up with Paul Goodman will be the first documentary about Paul Goodman, the late social critic, poet, philosopher of education, or, as he called himself, “man of letters in the old-fashioned sense.” Growing Up with Paul Goodman will follow a biographical through-line and be structured around interviews with family, friends, peers, and activists from the peace, educational reform, and gay movements who today are found in Maine, Minnesota, Massachusetts, California, West Virginia, New York City, Vermont, Paris, and Catalonia, Spain. The interviews will be interwoven with archival footage of Goodman and major events in which he was involved and photos made available by his 85-year old widow Sally. Off-camera actors will read some of Paul Goodman’s poems and anecdotes written by the late Harold Rosenberg, George Dennison, and Alfred Kazin. Growing Up with Paul Goodman will also include selections from Judith Malina’s journals of 1947-1957 as recorded by Ms. Malina for the film.
