Made  following the discovery of amateur footage shot in China in 1966 during  the first and most radical stage of the Cultural Revolution, In the Intense Now speaks to the fleeting nature of moments of great intensity. Scenes of  China are set alongside archival images of the events of 1968 in France,  Czechoslovakia, and, to a lesser extent, Brazil. In keeping with the  tradition of the film-essay, they serve to investigate how the people  who took part in those events continued onward after passions had  cooled. The footage, all of it archival, not only reveals the state of  mind of those filmed—joy, enchantment, fear, disappointment, dismay—but  also sheds light on the relationship between a document and its  political context. What can one say of Paris, Prague, Rio de Janeiro, or  Beijing by looking at the images of the period? Why did each of these  cities produce a specific sort of record?

Narrated  in first person, the film reflects on that which is revealed by four  sets of images: footage of the French students' uprising in May of 1968;  the images captured by amateurs during the invasion of Czechoslovakia  in August of the same year, when forces led by the Soviet Union put an  end to the Prague Spring; shots of the funerals of students, workers,  and police officers killed during the events of 1968 in the cities of  Paris, Lyon, Prague, and Rio de Janeiro; and the scenes that a  tourist—the director's mother—filmed in China in 1966, the year of the  Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. (Icarus)

Presented as part of the series "1968: Visions of Possibilities."