My father was born and brought up in a tiny conservative Catholic village in West Germany in 1963. Here, everyone watched everyone, and life was dull and predictable. From his childhood onwards, he wanted to break out and challenge the status quo of this kind of life and developed a strong urge to venture out into the world. When he was 16 years old, he ran away from his loving but simple-minded family for his first act of reinventing himself - and many would follow.
He is a dreamer, an adventurer, a free spirit. His great curiosity for the world became his driving force. It made him cross the Sahara Desert on a bicycle, join the Yogi Bhajan community in New Mexico, sell art in Berlin, and start an acting career in Los Angeles. When he met my mother in his mid twenties, he fell deeply in love with her and became a father shortly after. Perhaps this new life chapter seemed too permanent, too final. It didn’t work out, he felt deprived of his freedom.
After the divorce, my father turned away from the spiritual community and delved into the world of rave and psychedelics. He docked on to the early Burning Man community in San Francisco, carried out self-experiments in macro dosing in the forest and moved to Costa Rica. Only when my grandmother died, he returned to Germany… and stayed.
The film is a portrait of a wild man and a lonesome warrior who lived life to the fullest, and yet was unable to commit to the most sacred of all relationships: the one between parent and child. It is a documentary about him and his endeavours, seen through the eyes of his daughter - who is creating this film to open a safe space and focused context for getting to know each other, before it’s too late.