I was at a party a few months back when I got into a fairly heated debate with a guy about Sean Penn’s Into The Wild. John Krakauer’s book, upon which the film is based, is a well-researched investigation into the final journey of Alexander Supertramp a.k.a. Christopher McCandless, a  young man who left society to eventually (accidentally) die in the wilderness of Alaska. The story is controversial because many see Alex as profoundly selfish and dumb, while others, like me, see his story as the ultimate expression of free will and following ones path, even if the ending is not necessarily a happy one. I was very interested to see Peter Liechti’s The Sound of Insects: Record of  a Mummy (HotDocs screenings this Saturday and Tuesday, May 5) because the description implied similarities to Into The Wild, and indeed, there are.

The Sound of Insects is an incredible movie based on a profound and surreal story. A man with no ties to other human beings goes into the wilderness with the intention of starving himself to death. This is an important distinctive difference to Into The Wild, where the young man who died did so accidentally – I believe he meant to come out of the Alaskan wilderness but the fact that he didn’t doesn’t make him stupid (the central point of my argument in said heated party debate). The man in The Sound of Insects clearly had the intention to die and as the haunting narration, crafted from the man’s own diary discovered with his corpse, says, he was dead as soon as he arrived in the woods and began to starve himself.