When asked by a comrade why the press had such intense fear and loathing of the Red Army Faction's female members, Ulrike Meinhof replied, "Women are at the heart of human reproduction. Women are supposed to be passive, obedient, available and conciliatory. Women who break away, refuse to accept all this, may even take up arms. They're not supposed to do that. That's why people hate us."
And yet some of the radical-left guerrillas from the 1970s were, in fact, mothers. The documentary "Children of the Revolution" takes a look at two of them — Meinhof of Germany's Baader-Meinhof Gang and Fusako Shigenobu of the Japanese Red Army — but the story is told through the eyes of their daughters, Bettina Rohl and Mei Shigenobu.
Director Shane O'Sullivan does a decent job of using documentary footage, and interviews with aging radicals, to show the slide from '60s student protests into '70s violent revolution, via state violence and repression of peaceful protests. (And people convinced of modern Japan's political apathy may well be shocked to see the scenes of crazed street battles in Japan between students and cops in the '60s.) Meinhof moved from being a political columnist to being one of the Bundesrepublik's most wanted criminals, an anti-imperialist revolutionary involved in bombings and bank robberies. Shigenobu followed a similar path, starting with student protests against tuition increases and winding up in Lebanon training with the notorious Palestinian-guerrilla faction PFLP.
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