The Slow Business of Going

Petra Going is a migrant cyborg working for Global Nomad Project. With a rocking chair on her back she travels the world to collect the experiences of other people while being deprived of memories herself. Shot in different cities around the globe, Athina Rachel Tsangari's debut is an off-beat combination of fiction, theatre, documentary, poetry and experimental cinema. Petra constantly changes cities and hotels, and her exuberant non-stop trip turns into an original reflection on rootlessness, amnesia and longing which define the postmodern identity and new tabula rasa. As her ex-colleague Micah says reproachfully: Petra is a 'professional tourist'. Micah stopped travelling because she couldn't cope with living a 'borrowed life'. She wanted a home. For Petra, home is 'the capacity to keep going on without looking back nostalgically'. (International Film Festival Rotterdam)