Highway World - living, changing, growing

"Highway World - living, changing, growing" is a visual concept, embedded between asphalt and the mobile human being. In this nonverbal documentary film, the spectator sets out on a trip throughout giant highway construction sites in Africa, high-tech factories of the global car manufacturing corporations and multi-storey US highways. Other locations include the river-spanning capital highways of Abuja, Bangkok’s Bang Na Express which is built on giant concrete segments and California’s eight-lane super highways. The archive footage of "Highway World - living, changing, growing" dates back to the Thirties, likewise visualising the industrial history of car manufacturing and the construction of highways.

The footage, distilled from the industrial context, as well as Paisley Music (Ambient musical style) of sitar master Al Gromer Khan lead to a contemplative immersion into the highway worlds. The film manages without any comment. The actual narration "Highway World - living, changing, growing" intends to open the mind of the audience to human evolutionary processes, generated by a space-capturing and time-spanning highway world. During this journey, the viewer becomes “pillion” of several development stages (birth, infant, adult, death, rebirth). The human soul is formed by the different stages of construction (starting from the first blasting until the highway’s official opening) and the different stages of traffic (freely flowing traffic, stop and go, traffic jam).

Contemplation via repetition is a basic creative principle of the film. Graphic connections, cyclic repetition of similar visual content and film metaphors create the film’ s base for an immersion into the highway spheres. It is 81 minutes of “state of mind”. The entire associative documentary film (a cross-over of compilation and found footage film) was composed out of more than 63 hours of film, video material and 1.700 photos).

The associative documentary film comprises commercial, educational and scientific footage as well as computer animations from the fields of automotive industry, traffic research and personal footage of the director, Martin Hans Schmitt. The project was funded by the German Federal Film Board as reference film.