Rating: 4.5/5
A travelogue narrated by one who received the stories, philosophical musings, and meta-commentary on the nature of documentary from the traveler, collected in writing, bits of recounting, and the footage to match it, often in a more abstract sense
Combined to achieve a poetic tone rather than to tell a cohesive narrative, mixing the spectacle of parades and festivals with the mundanity of people standing idly, of stock footage of space launches and bomb drops, of footage on tv screens
The film is about the fetishization of memory and how images become stand-ins for it, about how culture is the manifestation of the insecurity of self and the inaccessibility of history, and about how video games and movie clips occupy our dreams
Could’ve been 20-30 minutes shorter and still accomplished all this, but beautiful all the same