If anything symbolizes the 20th century, it is the road. The automobUse this menu wherever you see it to explore the 2000 festival. ile, and the endless miles of asphalt laid down to accommodate it, gave ordinary people the ability to move - anywhere, anytime. No longer tied to the farm, the town or the neighborhood, modern man has become a restless traveler. Generational roots have been supplanted by constant mobility. Today's families are spread out, across the nation and the ever-shrinking globe. "Hit the road." " Get the show on the road." "Let's roll." The idiom of motorized humanity is the language of movement. But to what end? The road promises freedom, but sometimes delivers only separation. The road can be a means - of escape, of seeking new life, of deliverance. It can also be its own destination. All journeys are both away and toward. Getaway and arrival. They are physical movements through the landscape, and spiritual odysseys of the soul's destiny. This year's festival offers eight distinct looks at people on the road, pursuing everything from celestial answers to searing vengeance. They take to the road motivated by desire or necessity - often both. The road is sometimes the best option, sometimes the only option. Characters travel across vast open highways in Badlands and The Grapes Of Wrath and Paris Texas, congested urban streets in Run Lola Run, twisting jungle paths in The Wages Of Fear - and all three in Central Station. In The Searchers and The Gods Must Be Crazy, they travel where there are no roads at all - only the map of their profound and disparate quests. The many roads traveled in this year's films resonate with the rich panoply of the human experience, and the duality inherent in the journey: loneliness and community, desperation and faith, destruction and renewal, bitter hatred and redemptive love, loss and humor, estrangement and reconciliation. The road is now part of the human genome as much as our DNA. We are movement itself. But as we watch Ethan Edwards and Tom Joad and Kit Carruthers struggle through their journeys, let us remember that we are all on the road to something more important than recovering a missing child, escaping the Dust Bowl, or even survival itself. As vital as the temporal highways of our daily lives may seem, it is the fate of our immortal souls which matters most. For we are all on the road toward God - seeking His will in our lives, and His hand in our destiny. |
