After years of investigating across five different continents, a holistic detective on a quest to find his favorite fiction character in the real world realizes that the search is only just beginning.
How do you recognize a superbeing? This question haunts Finding Tom Bombadil, a detective documentary about a man on a coincidence-powered quest to find his favorite fiction character in the real world.
Tom Bombadil is a nature-loving, minor character in The Lord of the Rings, who mostly sings nonsensical songs. He's also the only one unaffected by the Ring. In 2015, Joost van de Loo became a holistic detective dedicated to finding Tom Bombadil. He's been searching for years, investigating across five different continents.
Joost says: "Somehow Tom Bombadil always stood out for me. He's so positive and unique; the oldest and maybe most powerful person in the universe, but power leaves him cold. My project assumes that he actually exists. We're assuming that somewhere, Tom Bombadil is living and walking among us."
Finding Tom Bombadil tracks the early stages of the worldwide search for Tolkien's most mysterious fantasy figure. Coincidences and chance encounters lead Joost - who gets help from a host of volunteers, field researchers and advisers - to investigate candidates in o.a. Shetland, Germany, England, New Zealand, South Korea, Tanzania, Finland and the United States.
After more than three and a half years of searching, Tom Bombadil; a 13.7 billion year old whimsical, musical superbeing who is keen on pleasing his girlfriend; has not yet been found. But Joost is undaunted. Through one of his advisers, professor of mathematics David Hand, author of the Improbability Principle, he has learned about the Law of Truly Large Numbers.
So now, Joost is appealing to the public for help. He is inviting thousands of people around the world to join the search and become holistic detectives too, so that sometime, somewhere, someone is going to meet Tom Bombadil.
