Please, please, please see this movie!

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.

It’s funny how life cycles, isn’t it? One day Bush, the next Obama. One day love and sunshine, the next rain and sorrow. Money, no money. I’ve very much been in a period of waning on my blog, but the doc days are heating up and so too must my little project here, or be I doomed back too obscurity!!

Through several channels has The Way We Get By by Aron Gaudet and Gita Pullapilly come to me. If you click to their website, you can see they are consummate internet marketers. I have to say that is about as technologically advanced as a film website can be these days – especially after all, they just premiered at SXSW where they won an Special Jury Award. They clearly have their ducks in a row, as the other channel that the film came through on was the P.O.V. press release as it will be on late in the upcoming season.

A prize at SXSW and a slot on P.O.V. plus their outstanding website are about as good of a pedigree for a documentary as you get these days. A lot of people believe in this film. The filmmakers shared a screener with me so of course, I watched it. It would take a hard heart indeed to not be taken in by the folks who are the focus of this film.