“Common People”, the documentary film screening series initiated by “Kitas Kinas”, continues residing in the inner courtyard of Kaunas Artists’ House and is hosting a screening of “Magic Trip” (dirs. Alison Ellwood, Alex Gibney, 2011) at 8 pm, 24 July.
In 1964, Ken Kesey, the famed author of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, bought an old school bus and set off on a legendary, LSD-fuelled cross-country road trip to the New York World’s Fair. He was joined by „Merry Pranksters”, a group of counterculture truth-seekers, including Neal Cassady, the American icon immortalised in Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road:, and the driver and painter of the psychedelic Magic Bus. Kesey and the Pranksters intended to make a documentary about their trip, shooting footage on 16MM, but the film was never finished and the footage has remained virtually unseen.
The directors of “Magic Trip” were given unprecedented access to this raw footage by the Kesey family. Over 100 hours of film and audiotape was restored and eventually it was shaped into an invaluable document of this extraordinary piece of American history.
Dir. Alison Ellwood, Alex Gibney
Documentary, USA, 2011, English, 107 min.
Entry is free of charge but visitors are welcome to donate. Recommended donation: 3€. Your contributions will be used to obtain screening licenses for upcoming films.
The „Common People“ screening series aims to discuss not only the content of documentary films, but also the whole notion of documentary cinema. The series will adress questions of ethics, directorial decisions. To film or not to film? When does a director cross the line of closeness with their subject? Should documentary cinema reflect ‘reality’ or the vision of its creator? These questions and others will be raised and discussed looking at films who maintain a close look at people telling their own stories: sensitive, creative, eccentric and based somewhere in the margins.
