This free-form documentary is loosely based on Candide by Voltaire and revolves primarily around Nick Cave and Blixa Bargeld but also includes Nina Hagen, Dieter Meier, Kazuo Ohno and others. It is no documentary in the conventional sense but rather a floating dreamlike journey that meanders from Hamburg to Berlin, Madrid, New York and Tokyo to the Ganges river, the Himalayan mountains and on to Marrakesch and Cairo. It is a collage reflecting sensations that deal with religion, blues, art, the state of being lost … more of a wondering, a stumbling… Music is provided by Einstuerzende Neubauten, Nick Cave, Beethoven, Verdi, Tote Hosen, Abwaerts and Mozart. –CPH-PIX
Cosmopolitan lotus-eater and fringe filmmaker Peter Sempel was born in Hamburg but raised in the Australian Outback, where he was deprived of utilities and befriended by a lazy kangaroo. The influence of his rearing can be felt as much as seen in the grainy compositions and quality of light with which Sempel builds his celluloid collages. While his subjects are most often intensely urban, larger than life, and neoteric by nature — Einstürzende Neubauten’s Blixa Bargeld, Motörhead’s Lemmy Kilmister, Berlin new wave diva Nina Hagen, 84-year-old mime/female impersonator Kazuo Ohno, the Gun Club’s Jeffrey Lee Pierce, Australian expat Nick Cave, actor Dennis Hopper, and filmmaker Kenneth Anger, to name a few — the images Sempel creates around them are as intimate, as strange, and as beautiful as an old sun-bleached photograph found in a forgotten starlet’s attic. —http://www.sfweekly.com
