Christoph Draeger b. 1965
Hippie Movie (2008)
Hippie Movie 2008
HDV and Super-8, 53 min

Hippie Movie is a funny and romantic 'documentary' about a Hippie movement named Tropolicalia, which was founded by Christoph Draeger in Warsaw as an ironic remake of San Francisco's Summer of Love 1967. The movement's name is a pun on Brazil’s Tropicalia movement of the late 1960’s. Poland, in the Sixties behind the Iron Curtain, didn’t enjoy anything like the summer of love, and its transition after 1989 from authoritarian communism to (hyper-) capitalism was fast, leaving little room for idealism or alternative ideology.

In the light of rising social injustice, an unpopular war in Iraq, ecological concerns and a new cold war looming, the film is a meditation on political, social and cultural behavior first coined in the 1960's by the Hippies, who protested and contested many issues that seem to make a comeback today. It is also a celebration of the inventions of 1960's rock music, and last but not least, a hallucinatory, post-psychedelic visual trip.

Marianka Dobkowska, curator at CCA Warsaw said in 2008: “It was really the summer of love last year.”