Content

Thirty years ago, Chris Petit directed Radio On, now considered a road movie cult classic. His latest film, Content, is an ambient 21st-century road movie, an associative film essay inspired by driving’s trancelike state rather than any linear unfolding of the road.
It is a film about, variously, life in the rearview mirror, memories of other journeys (Poland to Texas), modern technology (the YouTube generation, e-mail seduction), the age of the container and the relevance of Pokemon cards to the new landscape of the big shed. It is about the crossroads of life, driving into the flatlands of late middle age, about fathers and sons and growing up in the cold war, about genocide and political assassination, and the postwar landscapes of Europe and the USA, and how life looks now, seen by a six year-old from the back of a car.