Letters to dad

Duration: 15

Year Published: 1979

Creator: Beth B

Format: 16mm

Color: Color

Sound: sound

Description: Accompanied by an eerie pulsating score, nineteen men and women recite brief speeches to dad against a black background. They alternately voice feelings of subservient adulation, alienation from the world and smug insularity. Indicative of troubled psyches, their confessional communications proceed to darker themes of suicide and defiant martyrdom. These comments are particularly disconcerting when it is revealed, at the conclusion of the film, that they are portions of letters written to Jim Jones just hours before the mass suicide at Jonestown.