Jochen

synopsis

A sequence of bucolic black-and-white fragments of the southern Tuscan countryside opens a portrait of a peaceful daily routine, of reconciled old age spent in a sun-drenched idyll. Without a hint of emotion, Jochen, aged seventy, outlines the unsettled life of a retired drug smuggler, the life of a person with two stories – one as an outlaw, the second as the respectable head of a family. The account starts with the first days of the hippy movement and psychedelia in Germany, covers the profitable illegal subsistence associated with marijuana, opium and heroin, and ends with a transitory existence in the Tuscan paradise. It is a monotonous narrative of an uncommon life intertwined with the motif of personal freedom as symbolized by a ride on an unsaddled horse.

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