Promenade to Syracuse

Promenade to Syracuse is a film essay about a walking-tour in the footsteps of Johann Gottfried Seume´s travel account from 1802. Originating from many month of walking - from the Swiss border down to Sicily, taking along a camera, a book and memory - Promenade to Syracuse grew to a film about the general and specific aspects of travels in which one hopes to encounter the unexpected. It is not a simple film diary, but a distillate of impressions and collected materials which repeatedly break up chronology and geographical order associatively. From winter to summer, from Silicy to the North in one cut. Cinema as an interplay of literary commentary, montage and musical sound.

Not walking itself, not the strains and trivialities connected with it are the focus of the film (Lutz Leonhardt & Constantin Wulff never appear in front of the camera), but rather the effects and the experience of the specific mode of movement, not being able to stay long in any one place, the process-like aspect of the undertaking. A trip lasting 2000 km and four years of production. A passage through the concealed, through the history of literature, through hopes for change and freedom which traveling offers, through moments of everyday life in the street. Promenade to Syracuse reconstructs traveling as epic experience, created out of the childhood of thinking which does not mean "naivety" here, but openness for the event. For the spontaneity of kids, f.i., whose accomplice the camera becomes when participating in a hide-and-seek game. Or, for a song about Madonna and the angels sung by an enchanting old woman in her garden - captured wild-life. (Robert Weixlbaumer)