The Red Rock Music Festival occurred in Chile in October 1971, and it was not just any music festival.

It was the start of a Chilean cultural revolution in which the youth lived free and became what some would describe as hippies.

Gary Fritz, a professor of biology, documented the historic concert that took place in Santiago, Chile in 1970 with original footage and interviews from the festival’s participants.

The final product was his award-winning documentary, “Piedra Roja.”

“Piedra Roja,” which won top honors at the IN-EDIT International Film Competition in Chile over a Martin Scorsese film about George Harrison, was screened Wednesday in front of a full audience in the Doudna Fine Arts Center Lecture Hall.

One of the most important aspects of the documentary was the political animosity it brought out in Chile. The political left and right hated each other and both used the music festival and its hippies to attack the other party.

Patrick Barr-Melej, the chairman of the Ohio University history department and a collaborator with Fritz for “Piedra Roja,” said the political climate was like nothing we have ever seen.

“It was unlike anything young people in the United States have ever experienced in their lives,” Barr-Melej said. “This was a time of tremendous conflict, of deep animosities.” “The political parties simply would not share power or agree on a fundamental aspect of what their society should look like,” he said. “It is very difficult to overstate the fragile nature of Chile in the 1970s and how society was polarized between right and left.”

He added that the Red Rock Music Festival was never properly historically documented in Chile.

After a political coup resulted in new leadership for Chile, most of the footage and articles on the event were destroyed. Some Chileans did not even believe it ever happened, he said.

“It was a mythologized event; people sort of knew fragments but didn’t really know any details,” Fritz said. “Some people didn’t think it even occurred. It sort of cleared up the whole thing for Chileans as to what happened.”

Christian Kabbes, a junior marketing major, said he thought that the film was enlightening and entertaining.

“I really enjoyed it,” Kabbes said. “I had no idea that anything like that could happen anywhere but the U.S.”

Erik Jensen can be reached at 581-2812 or [email protected].