Global Home - DVD

Content: Young filmmaker Eva Stoltz has a problem: somehow she feels like she has no real roots anywhere. She feels like a nomad, driven by the constant urge to travel and discover new places. On the Internet, she comes across a community that seems to feel much the same way. The members of the host network couchsurfing.org offer strangers to host them in their homes for a limited time. For Eva Stoltz, this is the perfect way to get to know foreign countries, people and customs up close and personal. With a small film team she travels to the music-loving Mamatal in Mali, visits the wildlife lover Michiko in Tokyo, lives for a while with the ecologist Alice in the Palestinian West Bank and lets the dancer Clara show her life in the small village of Göreme in Cappadocia. And finally, she spends time with Casey in the US, learning about the ideals behind the Couchsurfing project right at the grassroots level. It's an exciting and enlightening journey around the globe, which also ends with the realization that globetrotter Eva Stoltz may be more deeply rooted to her home country than she thought...

Global Home is a very exciting and entertaining documentary in many ways. It is generally often reported about the negative consequences of globalization and worldwide interconnectedness. Eva Stoltze's film dares to take a different approach, celebrating cosmopolitanism and showing how much connects people, no matter how different their cultures may be. Positive curiosity and open-mindedness should also exist there, where otherwise fear and prejudice reign. This is also the idealistic basic idea behind a project like Couchsurfing: with friendship and open-mindedness against fear, hate and exploitation. Of course, the film doesn't make it so easy to claim that this would be an easy and even possible task. But it shows very nicely that sometimes even very small steps can help to get to the big goal at some point - or at least to make a little bit of a difference.

What also makes the documentary interesting is the way it was made. Stoltze shot her film with a mini-team and simple means under sometimes very adventurous moments. Of course there was no time to stage a lot. This gives Global Home an authenticity that many other documentaries unfortunately lack. Moreover, the filmmaker approaches the matter with a pleasant mixture of serious moments and humor. Exaggerated moments of consternation are fortunately in short supply, leaving room for a great deal of humanity, which makes the whole thing very likeable.

The basic idea behind Global Home makes this film entertaining and exciting, interesting and rousing. A convincing plea for open-mindedness and a good example that global networking also has many really positive sides. Worth seeing!

Image + Sound: The technical realization of the film is on a good level for a documentary. The image is clean and also has very good overall sharpness in quieter moments. Faster movements show small trailing effects here and there and in darker sequences also a few slight blurs. But overall, the positive overall impression prevails. This also applies to the sound, where the conversations or the voice-over commentary are mixed quite centrally. But some atmospheric ambient sounds add atmosphere and some dynamics to the proceedings. Good!

Extras: As a bonus, the DVD has a short but very interesting making of (about 12:08 min.) to offer, in which it is shown under what partly quite adventurous circumstances this documentary was realized with a mini-team. In addition there is some information as text menus. Good!

Conclusion: Global Home is a very interesting and entertaining documentary about the search for one's own roots, about cosmopolitanism, about curiosity towards other cultures and about the positive effects of global networking. A pleasant antithesis to the fear and hatred of everything foreign, which seems to be ubiquitous, especially on the net. A DVD worth seeing, which also due to the scarce, but extremely informative additional material has more than earned a Recommendable

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp