On March 23, 1978, more than a decade after he helped found student groups that spilled over into street demonstrations in support of Vietnam, Cuba and Chile; nearly a decade after manning the barricades of May '68, thirty-year-old Michel Recanati committed suicide. Romain Goupil, in his compelling first-person portrait of himself and his friends during the political upheavals of the sixties, focuses on Recanati, his boyhood friend turned comrade. The two pals were also teenage 8mm movie-makers and Goupil has created an engaging pastiche of their high-spirited films, intermittently flashing forward to look at the man, Recanati, and his times. Throughout the film, as throughout these lives, the naive seems inextricably mixed with the committed. Goupil and his "gang," a kind of junior league of the French Communist Party, become swept up in the New Left-just before being kicked out of high school. Recanati would later be jailed, while Goupil would remain somehow on the sidelines of both the fervor of May '68 and the disillusionment that followed while he recorded it all. Goupil's affecting portrait won the 1982 César (France's Oscar).