‘Echo of today’ Eerie parallels in film about Lennon and Ono in US

From sit-ins for peace to avant-garde happenings and covert surveillance of revolutionary sympathies, the world of John Lennon and Yoko Ono can seem removed from that of our own. But a new documentary about the couple exposes the eerie similarities between the 1970s and now, its Oscar-winning director has said.

- Nadia Khomami

One to One, by Kevin Macdonald, portrays Lennon and Ono's life over an 18-month period after their move to New York in 1971, when they quickly became figureheads for the counterculture and anti-Vietnam war movements.

Showing at the London film festival, it centres around the 1972 One to One benefit concert at Madison Square Garden - Lennon's last full-length concert and his only one after the Beatles - performed in aid of children with special needs.

“What I hadn't realised until I started making this was that the period seems like an incredible echo of today, it's like a mirror image,” Macdonald said.

His film incorporates newly restored 16mm film footage of the concert, archival news clips - of the Attica prison riot, Richard Nixon, the Vietnam war and the shooting of the Alabama governor George Wallace - as well as unheard tapes of Lennon and Ono's private phone calls, recorded by them when they became concerned the FBI was tapping their communications.

Combined, it acted as a corrective to the idea that there is something uniquely divisive about contemporary politics, Macdonald said. “There was a lot of stuff about the early environmental movement and ads on TV to stop oil. I thought we were only just having these conversations.