The Red Years - Were We Terrorists?

Thirty years later, they still react as if stung by a bee. This is how emotionally charged their memories are of their "red years," the period when their lives were determined by revolutionary ardour, by sincere indignation with the injustice in the world, but also by adventure and recklessness. They were prepared to fight, place bombs and use weapons. Some of them still consider the armed fight "a technical matter." Others, on the contrary, struggle with the issues involving violence and making victims. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the "Rode Jeugd" was active in the Netherlands: a radical leftwing organisation that did not shun violence and took Mao as its example. In the shadow of the German Rote Armee Fraktion, they fought against the Vietnam War and capitalist society. In Holland, they carried out bomb attacks. When a group of people left for Yemen to follow a Palestinian guerrilla training in 1976, the point of no return seemed to be passed. Their instructor over there, RAF member Peter-Jürgen Boock, who later kidnapped German union leader Hanns Martin Schleyer, remembers those Dutch very well. Were they fit to be terrorists? And will they ever shed this stigma? In The Red Years, these people look back and are confronted with archival footage of their actions, attacks and victims. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)