Tag: documentary

A Stranger Quest, the documentary about David Rumsey by Andrea Gatopolous, is now available to the public online, having made its debut last year at the Torino Film Festival (previously) and made the rounds of the film festival circuit. In it, Rumsey, who turned 80 this year, ruminates about loss and mortality, filtered through various lenses: the loss of a friend, the legacy created by a lifetime of map collecting. And let me tell you, it’s a trip. It’s not so much about maps (though the Urbano Monte reconstruction makes several appearances), or map collecting, as it is about a particular map collector; and it approaches its subject edgewise. With long silences, and long scenes shot from enough distance that they make the viewer feel like they’re eavesdropping on private conversations rather than watching a documentary, to say nothing of extended sojourns in Second Life, it’s far from what I would have expected, but I cannot deny the overwhelming art of it.

Map collector David Rumsey—he of the eponymous website and Stanford map center—is the subject of a new documentary directed by Italian filmmaker Andrea Gatopolous. A Stranger Quest premieres at the Torino Film Festival later this month and is scheduled for a 2024 release. The trailer, above, doesn’t reveal much. [Kottke]