In the documentary, we get warm, intimate glimpses of these men and their collegial solidarity. Like most elders, they compare notes on their health and talk about their families, but most of the conversation is about the current events and politics that have dominated their lives. Norman, for example, helped found the League for Total Disarmament and was a life-long peace activist. Together with Fred Stockholder, another founding member of the lunch group, Epstein helped found the BC Civil Liberties Association in the early 1960s. Epstein was an enthusiastic singer and late into his remarkably extended and accomplished life he sang with the Solidarity Notes Choir, a choral group dedicated to supporting worker struggles. Typical of the diversity of views around the lunch table, one funny scene in the film features members discussing their various names for the group, ranging from the Anarchist Lunch to DOG( Dithering Old Geezers,) The Professor Group and ROMEO ( Retired Old Men Eating Out), among others.
Members of the lunch group we meet in the documentary are members of several pro labour choirs and of Independent Jewish Voices, a group sharply critical of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians long before the current genocide in Gaza began. Another, more recent addition to the group, Ken Klonsky, campaigns with Innocence International, a group founded by Hurricane Carter, to free the wrongly imprisoned. Another, Carl Rosenberg, edited Outlook: Canada’s Progressive Jewish Magazine for years at the Peretz Centre. These guys are lifers in various progressive social movements, peace activists and supporters of labour struggles and Palestinian rights, and their time together was shaped by those shared ideals. (Full disclosure. I knew the filmmaker decades ago when she lived in Vancouver, and I have known some of the men in the Anarchist Lunch group over the years, working with several while I served on the board of the BC Civil Liberties Association.)
