The documentary Radical Love takes viewers inside the world of 1960s radicalism by focusing on the legal work of the husband-and-wife team Michael and Eleanora Kennedy. Specialising in high-profile civil rights cases, the duo defended the American Indian Movement, members of the Black Panther Party and the militant Left-wing group the Weather Underground, among many others. The film features interviews with many of the players in these intersecting social movements, including Weather Underground co-founder Bill Ayers, Eleanora Kennedy and Michael Kennedy, who, filmed in the months before his death in 2016, remained convinced of the righteousness of the causes he spent a lifetime fighting for. With his stirring portrait of deep love and radical activism, the US filmmaker William Kirkley raises timeless questions of law, ethics and political change.
Director: William Kirkley
Producers: Christopher Collins, Lydia Tenaglia, Chris Cechin-De La Rosa, Caroline Waterlow
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Computing and artificial intelligence
Why large language models are mysterious – even to their creators
8 minutes
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Spirituality
Through rituals of prayer, a monk cultivates a quietly radical concept of freedom
4 minutes
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Fairness and equality
‘To my old master’ – a freed slave answers the request to return to his old plantation
7 minutes
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Design and fashion
A ceramicist puts her own bawdy spin on the folk language of pottery
14 minutes
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Animals and humans
Villagers struggle to keep their beloved, endangered ape population afloat
19 minutes
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Art
Radical doodles – how ‘exquisite corpse’ games embodied the Surrealist movement
15 minutes
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Language and linguistics
Why Susan listens to recordings of herself speaking a language she no longer remembers
5 minutes
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Ethics
Plato saw little value in privacy. How do his ideas hold up in the information age?
5 minutes
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Information and communication
‘Astonished and somewhat terrified’ – Victorians’ reactions to the phonograph
36 minutes