For his 12th birthday, his parents gave him a movie camera and Sam Klemke began filming his life. Always in the hope that the future held great things in store for him and that his existence would be a meaningful one. What then happened over the course of the following decades was everyday failure. Undaunted and unpretentious, it is documented by a man who struggles with his obesity, faces professional disappointments and personal crises - and yet always comes to terms with the fact that plan and fact rarely coincide.
Klemke's exuberant archive of life is the ideal collection of material for the Australian-based documentary filmmaker Matthew Bate, who comes from the north of England and searches in his works “for meaning in the white noise of pop-culture”. Bate's frequency filter consists of contextualization, an extremely clever, organizing trick that establishes a connection between this individual human chaos and nothing less than the positioning of the planet in the universe. Sam Klemke's Time Machine (2015) makes an almost compelling connection with NASA's Voyager program and embarks on a journey that creates meaning, provides comfort and delights.
