In August 1969, roughly half a million people converge on Max Yasgur's dairy farm in Bethel, New York, for three days of music that becomes a defining image of the counterculture. This Director's Cut, assembled for the festival's 40th anniversary, cuts between full-length performances and the crowd and crew handling a event far bigger than its organizers planned for: overflowing roads, makeshift medical tents, and rain turning the fields to mud. Performance footage includes Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Who, and Santana, shot from the stage and the wings, intercut with handheld interviews of festival-goers talking about why they came and what they expect to find. The film sets the festival against its backdrop, brief news-style glimpses of Vietnam protests and a country in the middle of the civil rights era, without turning the concert footage into a lecture. What comes through most in the extended cut is logistics as much as music: how a small upstate town and a dairy farmer's fields absorbed a crowd larger than most cities nearby, and how the performers and audience kept the event running on its own terms for three days straight.