24 Hitchhikers
Director: Paul Detwiler
Writer: Paul Detwiler
Cast: Mike Burnell, Mike Brayden
Part of: identities Festival
Seen on: 16.6.2015

Plot:
In the 60s and 70s, a man picked up quite a few hitchhikers on the road, some of whom he brought to his home where he’d take more or less nude images of them. Detwiler edited those images together with thoughts of his own and poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke (spoken by Mike Burnell).

24 Hitchhikers worked very well for me on a visual level, less well when it came to the texts. The photos were beautiful and managed to give each of the young men their own beauty, which was wonderful. But when it came to the text, I already started off irritated because the version I saw mixed German and English a lot – I think everytime he cited Rilke, we got it in German, everything else was in English – and that was confusing and annoying. It also made me wish that he hadn’t included Rilke at all, even though I really do love his poetry, usually. More damningly, it did mean that I didn’t really focus on what was being said.

But it could be that that was just an issue with the copy we got, being in Austria and all, and that is particularly annoying if you speak both English and German. Since it is only a short film, the annoyance is of short duration anyway – and the photography is very much worth seeing.