This is one of the most brilliant, honest, REAL, heart-wrenching, gentle, soulful, graceful, funny, and powerful things I've seen in easily a decade. The director Kat Brooks is wondrous in this exploration of herself, the lives around her, and the relationship between them.
It's also touching to see how earnestly she really wants her work to mean something positive for the larger world, touch people's hearts, and make them think more consciously about their relative impact on each other. That's really the whole game in Hollywood (and the Arts more broadly) - the real challenge that every business force in the industry actually tries to prevent you from succeeding at because of the mindless fears the profit motive exacerbates, but which conversely is the most important to achieve. She wasn't finding that connection in oxymoronic "scripted reality television", and as a genuine documentarian, the dishonesty of that was truly driving her nuts.
She risks quite a bit revealing her jumble of feelings from hurt, to scared, to loving, to angry, to caring, to flat-out confused, to self-deprecatingly funny. Kat has some truly horrible emotional wounds, but ultimately has not been conquered by them - though she came frighteningly close to the edge, largely due to the carelessness of others. However, her personal challenges have made her well-placed to not just sympathize, but empathize with others, and that informs this work. As one of the friends she finds along the 11,000 mile journey simply says, "Good job."
In a world that is increasingly isolating while claiming to be hyper-connected thanks to our technological advances, I guarantee that this movie will resonate with you.
Kat GETS IT. Get the movie "Face 2 Face", then get connected for REAL. You are not alone.
