STEP BACK – AND FORWARD – IN TIME TO WITNESS THE MOVING AND POWERFUL SELF-PORTRAIT OF AN ‘EXTRAORDINARY NOBODY’
SAM KLEMKE’S TIME MACHINE
One Man Filmed His Life From His Teen Years to Late Middle Age, And His Amazing Story Comes to Digital HD and DVD From Virgil Films in March
New York, NY (February 29, 2016) – A man ages over four decades – and narrates his own story – in the remarkable true-life self-portrait SAM KLEMKE’S TIME MACHINE. This one-of-a-kind film about a man’s quest to document the span of his life arrives on Digital HD and DVD from Virgil Films on March 28, 2016.
In 1977, decades before the modern obsession with selfies and status updates, Denver native Sam Klemke started obsessively documenting his entire life on film. As he films his comments about himself and the year just ended, we see Sam grow from an optimistic teen to a self-important 20-year-old, into an obese, self-loathing thirtysomething and onwards into his philosophical 50s.
The same year that Sam began his project, NASA launched the Voyager craft into deep space carrying the Golden Record, a portrait of humanity that would try to explain to extraterrestrials who we are. From director Matthew Bate, SAM KLEMKE’S TIME MACHINE follows these two unique self-portraits as they travel in parallel – one hurtling through the infinity of space and the other stuck in the suburbs of Earth – in a freewheeling and at times emotionally overwhelming look at time, memory, mortality and what it means to be human.
Documentary pop-culture excavator Bate (Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure, I Want to Dance Better at Parties) discovered Klemke after seeing his viral YouTube video “35 Years Backwards Thru Time,” which showed Sam reverse-aging through his whole adult life. Klemke began sending the director decades’ worth of obsessively documented warts-and-all footage, from which Bate has miraculously sculpted this gonzo biopic. It’s a real-life Boyhood, a strange and intimate biopic about an “extraordinary nobody.”
SAM KLEMKE’S TIME MACHINE premiered at Sundance’s 2015 New Frontiers and was an official selection at the Rotterdam Film Festival and was nominated for Best Documentary at the Cleveland International Film Festival.
“Sam speaks for us all,” said LA Weekly. Variety’s Dennis Harvey called the film “adventuresome” and “unclassifiable,” adding it “confirms Bate’s as a distinct sensibility whose ability to articulate larger ideas lurking behind private expressions-turned-viral pop phenomena is welcome in the age of the selfie.” The Sundance Institute called it “one of the most bizarre, gross, moving, and awe-inspiring films about living a life on Earth today.”
Press Contact:
Stacey Cusack
stacey.cusack@sapkarpr.com
732.674.2824
Daniela Sapkar
daniela.markoska@sapkarpr.com
646.644.4418
# # #
SAM KLEMKE’S TIME MACHINE
DVD, Digital, VOD release: March 28, 2016
Running time: 89 minutes
Documentary
Not rated
