"Message to Love: The Isle of White Festival 1970" directed by Murray Lerner

If you are looking for a good “rockumentary” to watch, then “Message to Love: The Isle of White Festival 1970” could be for you. It covers the 1970 Isle of White music festival and in particular the chaos that went with it when around 600,000 people converged on this tiny island to witness performances from Jimi Hendrix and Miles Davis among others. The film does a good job in highlighting the many problems and incidents the festival faced including performers getting booed, stage invasions, and raucous youth attempting to break into the festival by tearing down the perimeter fence that was built to keep those without tickets out. Apart from some very good performances, the ultimate highlight of the film for me was head promoter Rikki Farr’s rants against the audience, which only got more vocal as the situation involving the people outside the fence worsened. This film is a highly enjoyable watch which delves into one of the climatic moments of the late-60s period, and is made even more interesting considering there would not be another festival held on the Isle of White until 2002.

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- Sam