Film Night and Q&A

@ Nimbin Bush Theatre

2 Blue Knob Road,
Old Butter Factory next to Bringabong on Mulgum Creek

FRIDAY 29 APRIL

6pm Mullumbimby Madness [90 minutes] + Q&A with director, Sharon Shostak

8pm DrugLawed [100 minutes] + Q&A with producer, Sid Menon

10pm The Scientist [60 minutes]

6.00pm Sharon Shostak introduces her new movie “Mullumbimby Madness”, on the legacy of the local hippies.

Australia's 'Biggest Little Town' of Mullumbimby in northern NSW was dying. The dairy farmers and banana growers were walking away from the land. Then came a wave – a’ naked hairy wave’ as a newspaper editor later described it – of new settlers who converged on the district. It was the dawn of the Australian hippies in the early 1970s and they experimented with strange building methods, a lack of clothing, moon dances and free love – and the drug marijuana, which changed the town in some unexpected ways.

In this feature documentary commissioned by the Brunswick Valley Historical Society, Sharon Shostak, child of the counterculture and creator of The Echo Doco and the award-winning Tish Ho, weaves together intimate snapshots with entertainingly articulate ‘new settlers’ now turned eccentric elders and some of the farmers and townsfolk who encountered them.

Also featuring renowned Australian journalist Kerry O’Brien, who was one of the first to report to the nation on the Aquarian revolution, Mullumbimby's Madness boasts a wealth of newly uncovered archival footage and photographic treasures to give you a taste of what the weird invasion was really like. Turn up, drop into it, and trip out.

8pm DRUGLAWED is the explosive documentary exposing how New Zealand has been co-opted by the US into fighting the failed War On Drugs. Over the last 100 years the US government has forced its drug control policies on almost every country on earth. 40 years since Richard Nixon declared the War On Drugs in 1972, 22 million Americans have been arrested for marijuana. Only one country in the world has higher arrest and conviction rates: New Zealand. DRUGLAWED examines how New Zealand fell in lockstep with US policies, and shows how smaller countries can break out.

10pm “The Scientist” traces the story of Nobel prize nominee Dr Mechoulam from his early days.as a child of the Holocaust in Bulgaria, through his immigration to Israel, and his career as the chief investigator into the chemistry and biology of the world's most misunderstood plant. Dr. Mechoulam ascertained that THC interacts with the largest receptor system in the human body, the endocannabinoid system (ECS).