Build a Ship, Sail to Sadness

“I want to see these hills shine and sparkle like disco floors.” So says Vincent (Magnus Aronson), the kooky dreamer hero of the short feature “Build a Ship, Sail to Sadness.”
Once you’ve spent a bit of time in Vincent’s presence, you start to appreciate his logic, or at least entertain it, as you might the babblings of a beloved friend or relative who is more eccentric than sensible. Vincent, who’s touring the Scottish countryside, hoping to cure its inhabitants of their “loneliness” via a mobile disco, is like a Werner Herzog hero without the magnetism. Yet while he’s harmless, he’s far from irrelevant. The objects of his endless monologues invariably deny that they’re lonely and in need of Vincent’s bargain-basement variety of magic, but sometimes you catch a glimmer of doubt in their eyes.
“Sadness,” directed by Laurin Federlein and written by Mr. Federlein and Mr. Aronson, is a deliberate affront to the very idea of slick entertainment. The movie was heavily improvised by Mr. Aronson, who inflicted Vincent’s deadpan spiels on various unsuspecting locals and shot on smudgy Hi-8 video, the format used to capture visionary epics like your cousin’s wedding and your nephew’s graduation. It wears its roughness as a badge of honor and is all the funnier as a result.
Da The New York Times, 1 febbario 2008