The Netherlands 2024, 30 min, HDA DOXY Films Production
by Jaap van Heusden, Jan Willem den Bok
The Ten Commandments: Nowhere Man
After the death of their solitary best friend and hero, two filmmakers find a box containing 24 old tapes of their road trip decades ago, which ended in argument and deception. They decide to edit the tapes to bring their friend back to life. Have they stayed true to their friendship?Sometime around the turn of the century, a grey Deux-hevaux was driving r to the coast of France. On board were three friends about to make their very first film. There was something in their friendship that was larger-than-life, something divine. They had to capture that in a film, in an ode to friendship. What followed were exhaustion, arguments and a failed film.
More than two decades later, two of the friends, Jaap and Jan Willem, find 24 old tapes of the road trip. Their headstrong and solitary friend Rob has since died. The friends wonder if they have remained loyal to Rob, with whom they became less and less in touch in the years before his death. To find an answer to that question the two try to bring their friend back to life out of the film material they have collected. In all his glory, complexity and whimsy. So that, hopefully, he himself will speak a redeeming word.
NOWHERE MAN is part of a documentary series on the Ten Commandments, produced by DOXY Films and EOdocs, in which ten filmmakers each give their take on one of the Commandments. Jaap van Heusden and Jan Willem den Bok ventured into the seventh commandment: ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’
The Ten Commandments - Complete Series