It was 1968 all over again at the Isabel Bader theatre on Saturday afternoon during the Mavericks presentation of A Time to Stir, Paul Cronin?s exhaustively researched and thoroughly engaging documentary about a pivotal student protest at New York?s Columbia University in April 1968. Introducing the film, Cronin admitted that the four hour film we were about to see was a work in progress, and that he?d even filmed two more interviews during his time at the Festival that he needed to figure out how to cut in with the rest of the footage. A soft-spoken, self-deprecation Englishman, Cronin said he wasn?t even comfortable calling it a film, and preferred instead to think of it as ?visual history.?

Whatever one might call it, A Time to Stir is, in its current form, an extremely well-edited, well-structured and absorbing document of those fateful days in April 1968 and, perhaps more importantly, of the people involved and their various different perspectives on the issues they were protesting at the time. It?s ironic to note that the protest, which was galvanized around the ?racist policies of the university?, was itself segregated, with the Student Afro American Society (SAS) and the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) occupying different ideological ground and therefore different university properties during the protest, which saw the two groups shut down the school for a week while they barricaded various buildings.

The differences of opinion that divided the protestors along racial lines provide the film with its subtle structuring strategy. Members of SAS describe those in the SDS as ?people who alienated people, sadly? who were ?talking politics while we were talking logistics.? Indeed the idealism of the white SDS protestors prevented many of them from seeing the naivete and hypocrisy in their demands for amnesty, while the SAS protestors accepted fully the consequences of their illegal actions; the SDS saw the protest as a revolution (?This is a revolution. I should know ? I?ve lived through 8 of them,? one professor is said to have remarked), while SAS regarded it simply as a demonstration.

Following the film, three of the protestors ? Mark Rudd of the SDS (and of the Weather Underground), Bill Sales of the SAS and Carolyn Eisenberg of the student strike committee ? were on hand for a very articulate and passionate discussion moderated by TIFF programmer Thom Powers. Sales appreciated the manner in which the film puts the SAS contribution, which had been overshadowed by the more media-friendly SDS at the time, back at the centre of the struggle. As did all the speakers, Sales also spoke to lessons that remain to be learned and the manner in which history is sadly repeating itself. ?We didn?t imagine something could be more brutal than Vietnam,? he said. ?Now we know. Nor did we know that two presidential elections could be stolen right in front of the American people.? Sales concluded by stating that it was absolutely essential to continue the struggle, and everyone there that afternoon was in full agreement.