Athina Rachel Tsangari – The Slow Business of Going (2000)

The first film of the director of Award Winning “Attenberg”. Won Best Film Award in New York Underground Film Festival, USA, 2002 and Lausanne Film Festival, 2002.

Petra Going is a migrant cyborg, an agent of the Global Nomad Project: an international “Experience Data Agency” which sends hundreds of “receivers” like her to wander the globe and record a succession of random encounters. Periodically, they return to agency headquarters where they deposit their accumulated memories into an archive. This archive is available to users who then vicariously and virtually inhabit the ready-made landscapes of touristic consciousness. The motto of the GNP: “Nostalgia For Rent.”

In Manhattan she meets an insecure assassin.
In Tokyo she convinces a hypothermiac gangster to get undressed.
In Prague a man is hit with a pie and collapses unconscious.
In Thessaloniki she dances a passionate tango.
In Tangiers, a soccer player contemplates getting out of bed.
And in Havana… in Havana she meets Micah for a long-promised swimming lesson.
And afterwards, Petra commits her profession’s one unpardonable sin: she allows herself to remember.

Filmed over five years in constant motion, developed in collaboration with its actors through dramatic improvisations and autobiography, “The Slow Business of Going” spans both geography and genre: from slapstick to surrealism, from film noir to science fiction, from tragedy to travelogue, from multimedia to melodrama.

A chronicle of collisions between male and female, the corporate and the corporeal, the personal and the global, The Slow Business of Going is a tribute to a century of cinema and to the new millennium of technomadic visions.