Slamdance Review - LEE KAZIMIR'S "MORE SHOES"

This is a blog so I can be personal, right? Ok. When I was 17 years old, I bicycled across America. From Sandy Hook, NJ to Florence, OR. I carried all my own gear--clothes, tent, food. Camped out wherever. I had a lot of minor adventures--fell asleep under a bridge on train tracks in Missouri during a lightening storm; drank water from a hose on the lawn of a nuclear power plant after a 112 mile day through the Idaho desert; got hit by a truck on purpose by two jackasses cursing me in West Virginia. But mostly it was a trip of minor observations, ephemeral feelings, and a grand struggle against boredom and exhaustion.

The goal was always the Pacific Ocean, but that final ride to the shore was crushingly anticlimactic. There was no triumphant feeling of accomplishment. No epiphany, or relief, or ecstasy. I was worn down, tired, ready to go home, and yet stasis felt ponderous. Staying in the same place for two nights for the first time in 58 days, I literally felt heavy, and depressed. It was only months later, maybe even years later, that I started to sense and understand the journey. There's still never been any pat lesson I learned, but on the whole I can now feel, in my soul (if I can use that word), a sense who I was on that trip, across these specific lands.

Lee Kazimir's "More Shoes" is a film with a similar feeling. Kazimir was stuck in a dead end job when he heard Werner Herzog proclaim that the best way to become a better filmmaker is to walk 5,000 km alone, for example from Madrid to Kiev. And so that's what Kazimir did.

This film is lyrical, hypnotic, and deeply introspective. Although Kazimir also has a singular destination, the film blissfully lacks a linear direction: a car on a highway has a linear direction; a man on a journey like this travels in all directions at once. Kazimir meets many people, hears some fascinating stories, and has mini-adventures, but to describe any of them would limit the scope of the film. In the end the most remarkably thing about this film is the feeling of being in motion again. It's the most extraordinary feeling in the world.