The Magic Trip

Colour, HD CAM
USA, 2011, 90 min
EP – European premiere
Section: Another View

Synopsis

Writer Ken Kesey (1935-2001), famous for his novel One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (with an Oscar-winning screen version by Miloš Forman), was one of those personalities in the 1960s who, through their work, combined the beatnik subculture with the hippie movement. In 1964 Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady, and other friends from Kesey’s group of Merry Pranksters set out on a trip across the United States in an old psychedelic school bus. Their trip, taken "on the wings” of LSD and ample imagination, has been set down in the history of American pop culture as exemplifying a journey in which life closely intermingles with art. Academy Award-winning documentarist Alex Gibney joined up with director and editor Alison Ellwood in order to creatively reconstruct the trip from Oregon to the New York World’s Fair using Kesey’s restored archive footage and recordings. But their movie isn’t merely an original documentary compilation: it is also a statement on the world of the 1960s, still closely tied to today’s American reality.

About the director

Alex Gibney studied at Yale and UCLA. He established himself as a producer and award-winning, engagé documentarist. Filmography (selected): the TV series "The Fifties” (1997), the financial scandal exposé Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005 – Independent Spirit Award), the film essay on society and violence Human Behavior Experiment (2006), the critique of brutality in the US Army in Afghanistan Taxi to the Dark Side (2007 – Academy Award and Emmy), the biopic of the legendary journalist Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (2009), and the story of the terrorist organization My Trip to Al-Qaeda (2009). He shot the documentary The Magic Trip with Australian filmmaker Alison Ellwood, who started her career as an editor and producer, contributing as a director to the documentary series "New York: On the Edge” (1996), "True Life” (2000), and "American High” (2000).