More Shoes

At one point, maverick filmmaker Werner Herzog (Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo) declared that every aspiring director should plunge into the fray of life by [making] a journey alone, on foot, for a distance of 5,000 kilometers, let's say from Madrid to Kiev - in lieu of attending film school. Herzog believed that such a journey would teach the aspiring director far, far more than film school ever could. Nascent documentarist Lee Kazimir took Herzog's prompting literally - so literally that he followed suit by actually embarking on the said journey from Spain to Russia, camera-in-tow. The resultant filmed record, More Shoes, both depicts Kazimir's journey - with documentation of his own daily physical exertion and the idiosyncratic characters he meets en route - and provides a unique, country-by-country portrait of contemporary Europe at the dawn of the 21st century.