the Rocaterrania Press Kit

Rocaterrania
a film by Brett Ingram
Running time: 73:47
Year completed: 2009
Genre: Documentary
”…a weird delight.”
Contact information:
Brett Ingram
2410 Springwood Drive
Greensboro, NC 27403 USA
www.brettingram.org
Brett Ingram
Producer/Director
(336) 675-5698
[email protected]
.com
Awards:
• “Best Original Music in a Documentary,” RiverRun International Film Festival, 2009
• “Best Documentary Feature,” Atlanta Underground Film Festival, 2009
• “Best of the Festival,” Indie Grits Film Festival, 2010
Selected Screenings:
• Special Preview Screening: Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, Missoula, Montana – Feb. 2009
• World Premiere: Cinequest San Jose Film Festival, San Jose, California – Feb./March 2009
• Big Muddy Film Festival, Carbondale, Illinois – Feb./March - 2009
• Kansas City Film Festival, Kansas City, Missouri – April 2009
• RiverRun International Film Festival, Winston-Salem, NC – April 2009
• Syracuse International Film Festival, Syracuse, New York – April 2009
• Maryland Film Festival, Baltimore, MD – May 2009
• Rhode Island International Film Festival, Providence, RI – August 2009
• Vancouver International Film Festival, Vancouver, BC, Canada – October 2009
• Buenos Aires International Film Festival, Buenos Aires, Argentina – April 2010
“The secret world of Renaldo Kuhler is about to go public.”
“Fascinating” – San Jose Metro
“One of the most exciting discoveries of outsider art since Henry Darger.”
- Roger Manley, Curator, American Visionary Art Museum
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Synopsis: Rocaterrania is a feature-length documentary journey into the secret world of 76-year-old
Renaldo Kuhler, a visionary artist who invented an imaginary country to survive his disaffected youth
and illustrated the nation’s history for six decades.
In the last four decades, seventy-six-year-old Renaldo Kuhler has created hundreds of plates for the
North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, beautifully illustrating diverse flora and fauna for
obscure scientific journals and reference books. Before the making of this documentary, none of his
friends and colleagues knew of Kuhler’s secret fascination – the inhabitants and culture of the
imaginary terra firma that is Rocaterrania.
Renaldo is the only son of Otto Kuhler, a German immigrant who served under Kaiser Wilhelm in
World War I before emigrating to America with seven dollars in his pocket. Renaldo grew up in the
immense shadow of his father (who became a famous American industrial designer and an acclaimed
landscape painter) and struggled to find his own identity as an artist.
Like many Germans, Otto Kuhler romanticized the American West and the freedom it symbolized.
When Otto fulfilled a lifelong dream by moving his family from upstate New York to a remote
Colorado cattle ranch in 1948, teenaged Renaldo found the isolation unbearable and escaped to the
private fantasy world of his notebooks. What began as the illustrated history of an imaginary country
called “Rocaterrania” became Renaldo's lifelong obsession - the forging of a secret and satirically
coded version of his own life.
Rocaterrania is a tiny nation of eastern European immigrants who purchased a tract of land along the
Canadian border - just north of the Adirondack Mountains in New York - after growing restless with
America’s notions of “democracy.” Over the next six decades, Rocaterrania saw two revolutions and
the rise and fall of a succession of czars, dictators, and presidents among a cast of characters vaguely
mirroring Russian historical figures.
But as the film reveals, each change in government reflects a deeper transformative meaning for
Renaldo, an outsider who struggled to escape an emotionally abusive family and searched for freedom
within a real nation threatened by forces of conformity and fearful of individuality.
Rocaterrania unveils Kuhler's astounding body of work to the world for the first time and reveals the
powerful story of his life in the process. In decoding the “real” world through Renaldo’s prismatic
rendering of history, the film seeks to excavate the insidious nature of conformity, the courage
necessary to be one’s true self, and the redemptive power of artistic creation. Featuring an eclectic
original score by Merge Records recording artists Shark Quest.
About the Filmmaker: BRETT INGRAM–Producer, Director, Cinematographer, Editor
Formerly a journalist, high school physics teacher, and electrical engineer on the Space Shuttle Main
Engine Program, Brett Ingram exchanged his pocket protector for a movie camera in 1990. His short
documentaries and animated films have won thirty awards collectively, screening at more than 150
festivals, museums, and cinema venues internationally.
In the summer of 2003 Ingram was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of
Independent Film.” The following year, his first documentary feature, Monster Road, won sixteen
awards (including “Best Documentary” at the 2004 Slamdance Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film
Festival, Independent Film Festival of Boston, Indie Memphis Film Festival, and Red Bank
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International Film Festival) and screened at more than ninety festivals, museums, universities, and
cinema venues internationally before premiering on Sundance Channel in 2005.
Ingram has been awarded a Visual Artist Fellowship (1995) and a Film and Video Artist Fellowship
(2002) from the North Carolina Arts Council. In 2007 he was awarded a Fellowship from the John
Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to support the completion of Rocaterrania.
Ingram teaches filmmaking in the Department of Media Studies at the University of North Carolina at
Greensboro. He has also taught filmmaking at Wake Forest University and the Center for
Documentary Studies at Duke University.
Director Statement: In 1998, I set out to make a short documentary portrait of a co-worker at the
North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh - an eccentric and immensely talented
scientific illustrator who spent his days in a tiny closet of an office drawing vole skulls and snake
scales. In the following decade, Renaldo Kuhler slowly allowed me into his secret – and very
personal -world of art, the illustrated history of an imaginary country he had invented more than a
half century earlier as a means of surviving a youth of unbearable loneliness and disaffection.
The technical brilliance of the illustrations and the emotional energy represented by the vast
complexity of Rocaterranian history was awe inspiring. That this little universe had remained
undiscovered for so long astounded me even more. It makes me wonder how many others are out
there in the world. There is no tidy "message" for viewers in this film. It is a mystery with many
intertwining themes and unanswered questions. For me, that's what made it worth a ten-year
journey.
About the Soundtrack: Composed and Performed by SHARK QUEST - Sara Bell, Laird
Dixon, Chris Eubank, Chuck Johnson, Groves Willer
Shark Quest’s music has been described as "an ingenious blend of art-bluegrass and lolling postmodernism" (Portland Mercury) and "Instrumental indie rock with a cinematic, desert-sweeping
grandeur" (All Music Guide).
Having collaborated with Shark Quest on the original score for his first documentary feature, Monster
Road, Brett Ingram initially chose to work with the same musicians on the Rocaterrania soundtrack
largely due to the band’s cinematic aesthetic and its enduring eastern European folk influences
(Rocaterrania being a nation of eastern European immigrants). As the film evolved into a journey
through many eras and cultures, Ingram requested a score with an eclectic blend of European and
North American influences that came naturally to Shark Quest. The tremendous versatility of each
musician’s abilities as composers and performers was a key to the score’s success.
The resulting score features an eclectic arrangement of instruments and the additional performing
talents of numerous North Carolina musicians, including: Phil Blank, Crowmeat Bob, Ecki Heins,
Todd Hershberger, Bill McCormick, David Morris, Carrie Shull, Corey Sims, and Amy Wilkinson.
Gabriel Pelli, violinist for the band The Old Ceremony, composed and performed additional music for
the film.
For more information, including trailer and stills, please visit:
www.brettingram.org
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