One of These Days

One town, one car, one dream: in the small town of Longview, Texas, the car is the trump card - especially when it comes to moving from one concrete surface to the next. “One of these days” is about mobility, about dreams of setting off for a better life, even if you have to become extremely immobile first. “Hands On” is the name of the annual endurance competition for a high-quality pick-up truck organized by a local car dealership. 20 participants surround the object of desire in a standing position, one hand always on the sheet metal, while a festival rages around them. There is a 15-minute break every six hours. Sleep deprivation, aggression, heat, stiff knees and racing thoughts are on top of everything else, until the one who is still standing at the end wins the car. You could call this “Western” in the age of consumerism “Last (Wo)Man Standing”, whose story provides all kinds of (also political) friction. Bastian Günther's debut film “Autopiloten” already interwove the fate of four men and their vehicles. Now Günther, once again with cameraman Michael Kotschi, connects the 20 “Hands On” participants across the individual bodies of the pick-up truck. Emerging from the competitors will be new father Kyle (Joe Cole, “Peaky Blinders”). From the organizers, we meet Joan (Carrie Preston, “True Blood”), who has supposedly “made it” and yet is all alone in this world - nothing to wipe the permanent smile off her face. Where Bastian Günther's feature film “Houston” (2013, with Ulrich Tukur) examined the fear of failure and the pressure to succeed on a handful of “value creators”, “One of these days” is set at the bottom of the capital hierarchy. The story is based on a true event in 2005 and, for Günther, “moves between extremes. Between drama, humor, suspense, hysteria, hope, the famous '15 minutes of fame' and the silence before the shot.” The evocative images were captured in the warm, sandy autumn light of Louisiana, into which, in keeping with the fictional escalation, more and more rainy days creep in. Bastian Günther wants to use this modern gladiatorial battle for the amusement of the masses to explore what constitutes our addiction to entertainment. His film is intended to make us think about what our environment does to us and, above all, what we do to the environment in our search for happiness. Ultimately, this concentrated experimental set-up tells us a lot about ourselves, about the way we live - and perhaps, as the director says about his project, also about an increasingly virulent threat scenario: “What happens when only the law of the jungle applies? And what has to happen before we change that?”