You Got to Move

Subtitled “Stories of Change in the south,” this award-winning film is a “delightful, hard-nosed retrospective retelling of the Southern Civil Rights struggle, told by Southerners, black and white, but updated to deal with contemporary social problems.” The title expresses the film's theme — you got to keep moving and keep confronting ongoing social injustices, as part of the democratic process, and to affirm your self-worth . . . Not a grim didactic documentary, or political tract, YOU GOT TO MOVE is often funny and dramatic, with plenty of foot-stompin' mountain music, as colorful Southern characters in homespun anecdotes describe their metamorphoses from passibity to activism. “There's nothing fixed that you can't unfix,” muses one veteran of the famous Highlander Folk School, the 53-year-old center in the Tennessee mountains where courage and social change are the curriculum. the film uses stock footage, old recordings, still photos and newspaper headlines to chronicle attacks on Highlander by state authorities fearful of alleged “subversion.” –Variety