This extraordinary feature documentary explores the San Francisco based Peoples Temple, which under the charismatic and forceful leadership of Jim Jones, offered an apparently perfect balance of spiritual fulfillment and political commitment. Jones not only preached about integration, equality, and social justice, but also built an organization that provided food, clothing, and shelter and political savvy to his congregation and his community.

On the surface, Jones and his multiracial congregation embraced the values of a model society, but just below the surface was a boiling mix of faith and zealotry, revolution and utopia, race and class, loyalty and coercion, charismatic leadership and demagoguery. In the summer of 1977 an article in “New West” magazine reported that defectors were giving accounts of physical, sexual, and drug abuse, financial corruption,and that members being held against their will.

On November 18, 1978, over 900 members of Peoples Temple died in the largest mass suicide/murder in American history. Using never-before-seen archival footage, home movies, and survivor interviews, “Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple” tells the story of the people who followed Jim Jones from Indiana to California and finally to the remote jungles of Guyana, in a quest to build an ideal society.