Le voyage de Joachim
France,
1995, 52 min
Shown in 1996
CREDITS
- dir
-
Frederic Labourasse
- prod
-
Serge Lalou
- scr
-
Frederic Labourasse
- cam
-
Frederic Labourasse
- editor
-
Thierry Ragobert
- source
-
Films d’Ici, Les
- gga award
-
Golden Spire, Film & Video: Biography
- premiere
-
North American Premiere
-
COMMENTS
Shown with Fin de Siglo. Frederic Labourasse in person.
OTHER
Joachim, an Amazonian Indian from French Guyana who speaks a jaunty French, is a boat operator whose intellectual curiosity and joie de vivre would stand him in good stead in any number of alien cultures. He fulfills his ambition of seeing America by taking a trip with his wife Monique to visit his friend Alex in Miami. This piece, which early on threatens to give us a National Geographic-like view of a native people, trades forest canopy for freeway overpass and quickly turns into a wry look at the often inexplicable lifeways of our own culture. Through our foreign guests, we visit a hokey souvenir-shop-style Indian reservation, fill up on all-you-can-eat buffets, take a dip in a Jacuzzi (“it’s instead of the river”), spend New Year’s eating “leaves... iguana food” with Alex’s retired parents, and wonder why God gave everything to the whites. After two weeks, we can’t wait to get back home to the jungle.
—Toni Hanna
FACTOID #99
Philadelphia-born, British-raised director Richard Lester, who shot the trippy Petulia in San Francisco during the 1967 Summer of Love, directed our Opening Night film and attended the Festival two years in a row, accompanying 1966’s A Funny Thing Happened On The Way to the Forum and 1967’s How I Won the War.
