In the 1960s, filmmakers investigated new forms of production in dialogue with radical shifts in art, music, performance and popular culture. Following the example of the Beats, the counterculture was alive with protest, freedom of expression and the breaking of taboos, and from the Film-Makers’ Coop to Andy Warhol’s Factory, portable 16mm cameras were bringing a whole new way of seeing to the cinema screen. These heady days of “underground film” were captured by Gideon Bachmann in a spirited broadcast for German television, Underground New York (Protest Wofür). Rarely seen today, it is one of the few surviving documents to show aspects of New York’s independent film community during this exhilarating period.

The film is a portrait of the New York underground film, with rare footage of Shirley Clarke, George Kuchar, Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas, Allen Ginsberg, Tuli Kupfberger, Carl Linder, Michelangelo Antonioni and many others.

Gideon Bachmann, born in Germany, lived in the USA and Italy. He is a journalist, a photographer and a movie director. He realised some legendary documentaries, as Ciao, Federico! (1969), A Camera Is Not a Molotov Cocktail, The Schlöndorff Protocol, the Tv series Movies on Movies and The Cinema of the Men Who Say No. He works to the project Vox Humana after longtime.