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Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple. Dir. and prod, by Stanley Nelson. Firelight Media, Inc., for American Experience, 2007. 86 mins. (PBS Home Video, http://www.shoppbs.org/)
On November 18, 1978, over nine hundred residents of Jonestown, the Peoples Temple farm community in the jungles of Guyana, committed mass suicide. In Jonestown, the director Stanley Nelson skillfully utilizes survivor interviews and extensive archival footage to tell the engaging and heartrending story of the socialistic new religious movement, its diverse and idealistic members, its troubled founder Jim Jones, and its tragic end.
The history of the Peoples Temple has been well documented in several useful books. James Warren Jones founded the church in 1950s Indiana. Jones's religious vision combined interracial worship, liberation theology, and Pentecostal-style faith...