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Nearly 30 years after the Free Speech Movement rocked the campus of the University of California at Berkeley and heralded the nation’s most tumultuous decade this century, the film

“Berkeley in the Sixties” looks at the movement and its people with the eye to history.

Nominated for a 1990 Academy Award and named best documentary by the National Society of Film Critics, the film will be shown as part of public television’s “P.O.V.”

Filmmaker Mark Kitchell talked to Sharon Bernstein about the documentary, which was six years in the making and was produced with money raised in the Berkeley community.

Why did you make “Berkeley in the Sixties”?

I was living in Los Angeles and trying to break into the film business. And I was getting thoroughly frustrated with writing screenplays and trying to break into a business that has fundamentally different values than I care about, so I decided to go back to making documentaries, which is what I had done in college.

Were you part of the student movements of the ‘60s?

I was growing up in San Francisco, being shaped by a lot of this, and you could say that (making the film) was going back and making sense of the forces that formed me and in a sense my whole generation.

You make a point in the film of distinguishing between the counterculture, the hippie movement that was happening in San Francisco and the political activism that was taking place in Berkeley. What is the importance of that distinction?

One of the things that the film does for people is allow them to explain to their children the difference between a radical and a hippie, because over time the image of the ‘60s has become that of a rock-throwing, dope-smoking hippie radical, all rolled together.

One of the key dynamics of the ‘60s was the relationship between the counterculture and the student movement. I see the counterculture and the political student movement as the twin poles of the ‘60s, and it was the very strong dynamic between the two that we tried to explore.

Does the film have a point of view?

What I’m trying to do here is tell it like it really was rather than give it some grand meaning.

I used to write that the ‘60s were more important because of the fundamental questions that were raised about the direction of society than for any particular answers. I would write that in that sense, the ‘60s are continuing, that those questions remain at the center of our society.

What will viewers take away from the film?

In a way it’s like a Rorschach test--different people get different things out of it and see different things.

Some people go to see our film and they come away very depressed, because it’s not like that now, and because they get a message from the film that you can’t change things.

But (other viewers) can look at what seemed to be a bleak time, (and realize how fast things can change). A lot of the people in the film talked about how before the Free Speech Movement they were a small group, working on the fringe, and overnight it blossomed into a mass movement that really moved a lot of people and changed their lives in a lot of ways.

“Berkeley in the Sixties” airs Tuesday at 10 p.m. on Channels 28 and 15.