A Journey Into Bliss

Directed by Wenzel Storch

With Jürgen Höhne, Jasmin Harnau, Holger Müller, Jörg Buttgereit and Harry Rowohlt

The film deals loosely with the adventures of the grizzled Gustav who captains a ship – a giant floating ‘snailboat’ – with a crew of talking animals and lumbering sailors in blackface. It unspools like a perverse children’s story book, all at once cuddly cute, grotesquely obscene and beyond absurd as normal narrative logic shatters, giving way to an episodic, free-associative structure that one critic likened to “cinematic memory association.” (joergbuttgereit.com)