1000 Journals

The theme of the AFI festival this year is "See a film. See your world," and no film captures this spirit more than 1000 Journals. The documentary is about random people worldwide who have been touched by 1000 traveling journals, and also speaks to our inherent desire as human beings to connect, create and share despite the borders that separate us.

Whether as a reflection of the physical land you inhabit, a place you call home or your intellectual or emotional state of mind, the films this year at AFI aim to bring "your world" to the screen. 1000 Journals parallels this message in both a literal and figurative sense, says AFI documentary programmer Natalie McMenemy. "We're an international film festival and this film is about an international adventure."

1000 Journals began not as a film but as a collaborative art experiment. During the summer of 2000, San Francisco-based graphic artist Brian Singer, a self-described introvert who is known on his website only as Someguy, slowly dispersed 1000 blank journals all over America and about 35 countries. Inspired by bathroom scrawl, he thought journal contributors, like graffiti writers, could feed off of each other's work. He asked those who discovered the journals to simply add something - a story, a drawing, a photograph, "anything really" - and then to pass it along so the adventure could continue.

Three years later, journal #526, which had traveled to thirteen states, Brazil and Ireland returned - in a purple velvet bag, no less. Enter Andrea Kreuzhage. When the German-born filmmaker heard about its arrival and saw the scans of its pages posted online, she became obsessed.

"I was electrified. I started to think about why this one had come back and where the other 999 could possibly be. I literally could not stop thinking about that," says Kreuzhage, a veteran of more than 20 years in the film industry. With experience that spans development, financing, production, marketing and distribution of TV productions and feature films, she has been involved with such other festival-bound films as Strictly Ballroom (Cannes 1992), Texas (Sundance, Berlin 2002), and Two Hands (Sundance 1999). "I wanted to understand the serendipitous path the journals were taking and the artist's motivation," she adds.

Kreuzhage assumed the role of a sleuth, analyzing the website for clues. She researched the travels of every single journal, using the data available on the 1000 Journals website and whatever contact information she could make out from posted scans. Since many of the addresses were no longer valid, she had to piece together information from public records, phonebooks, Google, Yahoo, and community sites. Over the course of several weeks, she sent roughly 5,000 emails; posted hundreds of letters via snail mail; and made many, many phone calls. After writing a partial script based on the first answers she found, she located Someguy and sent him her treatment and proposal. Before she knew it, she was flying to Frisco to meet him.

Once Someguy posted news about the film on his website, a lot of people got in touch directly. "On really good days, it felt like we all [were] miraculously connected, and that every one of the 1000 journals must be alive and [could] be found," recalls Kreuzhage. But there were also the not so good times, which they dubbed the "Dead End Days." Emails bounced back, letters came back marked ‘Return to Sender' or there was silence.

But tenacity and faith paid off, and during the 23-week shoot, Kreuzhage and director of photography Ralph Kaechele traveled all over the globe and interviewed nearly five hundred people.

"For the body of the film, we go from place to place; it's a little bit like flipping a page in a journal and encountering another story. And while we do that, we see...how they are interconnected and how these people react to one another," Kreuzhage explains.

Kreuzhage managed to get her hands on 80 of the journals, which serve as protagonists in the film. We peer over contributor s' shoulders and witness the beauty of these living journals, which over time tripled in weight and became exquisite pieces of art. It wasn't enough to write or draw or leave a picture; according to Kreuzhage, many of the participants felt compelled to literally impart something of themselves: There's a little bag of someone's favorite spice in Journal 278; dead cockroaches are affixed to some of the pages of Journal 988; and in Journal 526 is part of a discarded Pacemaker and a transfusion needle.

The journals allowed people to leave behind a mark, share their feelings, ease their loneliness and reach out to worlds beyond their own, and the film celebrates this. The practice of sending a message in a bottle may be passé, but 1000 Journals is a testament that the impulse to reach out to strangers will always survive.

The documentary 1000 Journals is screening at the 2007 AFI Fest now in progress.