ALTAMONT is a dramatic feature film set against the final, burning months of the American counterculture. Seventeen-year-old Marcus Johnson — a gifted Black guitarist from Oakland — and Lily Sanders — a white cop's daughter and poet from Berkeley — meet at a record store and fall passionately in love. Their relationship unfolds across the summer and autumn of 1969 in the bars, parks, bedrooms, and backroads of the Bay Area.
The film tracks their love with honesty about what it costs — the disapproval of Marcus's family, the outright hostility of Lily's father, and the quiet, constant pressure of a country that has not made peace with the idea of them. Against this, Marcus plays his music and writes songs. Lily fills notebooks with poems. They make a plan to disappear together after Altamont.
On December 6, 1969, that plan dies with Marcus at the hands of a Hells Angel, a knife, and the racial hatred that the counterculture era never managed to dissolve. The film ends not with redemption, but with the surviving characters carrying the weight of what happened — James into the Black Panthers, Lily onto a bus to nowhere in particular, Mrs. Johnson alone with a candle and a photograph.
ALTAMONT is positioned in the prestige drama market alongside films like Moonlight, Almost Famous, and BlacKkKlansman — films with a strong point of view about American history told through intimate, personal stories.