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Building Bridges: Bill Youren’s Vision of Peace (E, 82 mins) Directed by John Chrisstoffels ****
Bill Youren lived what by any standards is a storied life.
He was born into a banking family, attained scholarships to study at Victoria and Auckland, attained first-class honours and became a lawyer in his 20s.
He quit the law at the age of 25, travelled from Adelaide to Perth by truck and car and returned to New Zealand to farm on a station he bought in Hawke’s Bay.
Bill’s restless mind and deep commitment to fairness and equality led him to set up farmer’s co-operatives that still exist today, and also into a life-long fascination with China – and that nation’s experiments with new ways of managing economies, societies and populations.
Building Bridges: Bill Youren’s Vision of Peace is an extremely likeable and immersive dive into a life that does nicely as a primer for so much of New Zealand’s – now mostly hidden – social history of the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s.
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As a portrait of a life lived at pace and well, Building Bridges: Bill Youren’s Vision of Peace is a lovely accomplishment.
Bill was a socialist, but also a successful farmer. He was a peace activist before the term was coined and would certainly have been a conscientious objector, if anyone had been foolish enough to reintroduce compulsory call-up in the face of the Korean and Vietnamese wars. But he was still essentially a dyed-in-the-wool Kiwi bloke who could wield a shearer’s hand-piece, or shoot the eye out of a possum with the best of them.
Bill travelled widely, but especially with China, where he wrestled – as did a generation – with the genocidal blunders and cruelties of the regime.
He was a polymath, a speaker of several languages, a husband to Leila and a father to two sons and a daughter.
As a portrait of a life lived at pace and well, Building Bridges is a lovely accomplishment. And as a window into a few decades of the actual, human history of Aotearoa – and not just the stuff that the newspaper archives might tell you about – this is a crucial document.
Happily recommended.
Building Bridges: Bill Youren’s Vision of Peace is now screening in select cinemas nationwide.
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