The War at Home on AllMovie

An acclaimed documentary, The War at Home reveals what happened in Madison, Wisconsin during most of the 1960s and the early '70s when students and the community began to protest the Vietnam War. Directors Glenn Silber and Barry Alexander Brown spent a long time going through the news archives of a local television station to cull footage from those years. Then they selected specific clips and first put together a background on the war. Quotes from John F. Kennedy to Richard Nixon and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, along with many other public figures vividly bring back the past. Next, the events at Madison are brought forward and local public figures speak memorable lines. Demonstrations are shown, as well as news events, like the man, now in jail, who bombed an Army information center on campus and killed a student. Emotion and drama run high throughout, making this a worthy documentary for anyone who either has forgotten or never knew what those days were like. This documentary won a Special Jury Prize at the now defunct U.S. Film Festival and was nominated for "Best Documentary" at the 1979 Academy Awards.