Cinema Slate -a new distribution label specialized in foreign cinema (with an emphasis in Latin American films)- has recently announced the theatrical opening of the Brazilian documentary I Touched All Your Stuff / A vida privada dos hipopotamos, following the film’s US premiere at the Museum of the Moving Image's First Look series earlier this year.
Winner of the Best Editing award at the Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival, and an official selection at RIDM and FID Marseille, I Touched All Your Stuff will open Friday, August 28 at Cinema Village in New York City and at The Arena in Los Angeles, before expanding to other cities throughout the fall. A digital release is expected in late August or September, and the film’s home media release is slated for December 2015.
Co-directed by Maíra Bühler and Matias Mariani and acclaimed as "enjoyably quirky (…) A rather delightfully offbeat film" (Screen Daily), I Touched All Your Stuff tells the story of how Chris Kirk, a brilliant IT technician from Michigan, left a stable job in Olympia, Washington, moved to Bogotá, fell in love with a mysterious woman and ended up in a Brazilian jail for international drug smuggling.
After reading about Pablo Escobar’s hippos in a magazine, and feeling that his life had reached a dead end, Chris Kirk bought a plane ticket to Colombia and decided to start anew in South America. On his first day in Bogotá, he met an alluring Japanese-Colombian woman named "V," and the two began an intense love affair that would culminate in his arrest in Brazil.
As Chris Kirk began to re-construct the story of his relationship with "V" from prison, he authorized both filmmakers to retrieve an 80 GB hard-drive that was in his friend's possession in the US. That drive supposedly contained the digital reminiscences of his life in Colombia -- and an outburst of videos, pictures, emails, chat exchanges and other data that would offer proof of his innocence and shed new light onto V's identity.
Despite the new trove of evidence, no narrative proves to be fully verifiable, and the closer the filmmakers get to understanding the puzzle of Chris Kirk’s story, the more they struggle with his unique interpretation of events. In the process, Maíra Bühler and Matias Mariani seem to fall prey to a similar form of compulsion that drove Chris Kirk to Colombia in the first place.
