Terrestrials

"I was her and she was me", says a young man in split-screen about his psychedelic trip. In The Terrestrials, the Dutch-American filmmaker René Daalder shuttles back and forth between the psychedelic sixties and the modern world of cyberspace. A group of students at the University of California Santa Cruz wants to unlock the archive of the famous counterculture icon Timothy Leary (1920-1996) for the Internet generation. This "sci-fi" documentary alternates archive footage with new material that the students in part filmed themselves, and Dr. Leary's charisma still seems to have a hold on contemporary youth. Leary presented himself as a prophet of the psychedelic experience, which could be brought on by taking the synthetic drug LSD and would bring humans to a higher consciousness. If enough people would "Turn on, tune in and drop out," they would succeed in overthrowing the establishment and ultimately allow Love and Peace to reign free on earth. In later years, Leary began to proclaim that the PC and Internet were even better stuff than LSD, although he warned that a computer can crash just like the human brain. Despite all the flashbacks, The Terrestrials primarily deals with present-day young people looking to find themselves, and occasionally crossing the boundaries of their own mental health along the way. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)