S3.E4 ∙ Drinks Nail Polish/Ear Digger

What does combat look like through the eyes of a US Army Chaplain?

A coming of age story, and a portrait of contemporary Israeli society as told through the eyes of a young Israeli expatriate, returning to the land he left 7 years earlier to try and come to grips with the paradox in being Israeli and in Israeli reality. A deeply personal story of belonging and detachment, Only About Myself I Know to Tell is a unique personal yet universal voice never before heard in the loud discussion about Israeli identity.

Pietro Ingrao, 97, tells his story through a long-distance exchange he has with a student from the 1980s, who is distracted from studying by the radio, which is transmitting Ingrao's own speech during the sixteenth Italian Communist Party's conference in March 1983. A long interview which takes place between January and June 2012, the film is not so much a story of Ingrao's life as much as it is his own tale on politics as a passion and 'as an instrument to change a world I don't like'. Ingrao tells the story of his twentieth and twenty-first century adventures. He talks about his great passion 'I wanted to be a film director, but instead I was kicked into politics'.

This film portrays the final days of Johannes De Boer 'Hans', a Dutch ex-patriot who found his home in the American hippie movement from his beginnings in an orphanage under Nazi occupation. The story begins with a seven minute documentary presentation of his early life, including footage from the Nazi invasion with an interview by writer, Danny Litowitz. The story shifts to present-time with Hans receiving a diagnosis of terminal cancer. Secluded in his rustic mountain home, conflict develops both internally and externally as he questions the choices he had made, having taken a road less traveled, valuing freedom above all else. In the end, his life-long battle against 'the institutions' resolves through creative expression and recognizing the beauty in all things less than perfect.