Ernest Thompson, the playwright responsible for the Pulitzer Prize winning
On Golden Pond
, makes his directorial debut with
1969
. Kiefer Sutherland plays a draft-age youth who undergoes an epiphany when one of his friends is killed in Vietnam. Sutherland's subsequent antiwar stance causes a great deal of tension within his own family, though his mother, Mariette Hartley, tries her best to understand.