Rocaterrania

Brett Ingram

United States

Synopsis

A journey into the secret world of 76-year-old Renaldo Kuhler, a scientific illustrator who invented an imaginary country in order to survive his disaffected youth.

REVIEW

Here is a film that is genuinely unique-because it's about a genuinely unique man. Renaldo Kuhler is an artist for the North Carolina State Museum of Natural History. But that's only his day job. He's also the full-time creator and official proprietor of the Republic of Rocaterania.

If you've never heard of Rocaterania, don't bother Googling it. The place is a fantasy nation that Renaldo has created, and which he has located geographically somewhere in the northern Adirondacks. But Rocaterania isn't simply a product of Renaldo's fertile and fanciful imagination. It exists physically in hundreds of carefully drawn maps, in its own language and vaguely Cyrillic alphabet, in historical literature and in drawings of its inhabitants-all of which Renaldo keeps in the official archives in his own home.

The real-world Renaldo is a character in his own right. He wears Rocateranian clothing of his own design and has several inventions to his credit-including a pipe he made specifically to hold cigarettes ("the cig-pipe").

Renaldo and his fantasy world are the subjects of this charming documentary. The world he's created not only proves an extraordinary subject for a film, it also shows how imagination can save the soul. "The ability to fantasize is the ability to survive," Renaldo says.

Here's proof: A political revolution that overthrew an autocratic, aristocratic Rocateranian regime (chronicled in exquisite and fascinating detail, with maps, portraits and even a marching song), and which led to the eventual creation of republican government in Rocaterania, is paralleled by "the revolution representing my breaking away from home," that is, from an authoritarian father and a repressive mother. That break with his past made it possible for the real life, emotionally troubled Renaldo to become his own, individual and free self. A person's brain "is his government," Renaldo says, thus merging fantasy with psyche.

Don't be fooled: Renaldo is no mere eccentric. He is a man whose fantasies have made it possible for his gentle and creative inner self to emerge. He has become accepted, eccentricities and all, on his own terms, by colleagues, friends and neighbors. "One of my greatest triumphs," Renaldo says, "was becoming the man I wanted to be-myself!"

This film wisely stands back and lets Renaldo, in his own words and in his documentation of Rocaterania tell the story with charming honesty, via camera work that never comes between the subject and us.

-David Feldman