My Friend Paul

As young teenage boys, director Jonathan Berman and his friend Paul re-enacted Hollywood movies, with Paul invariably playing the role of the gangster whom is shot at the end. Some twenty years later, Paul is released from prison after a ten-year sentence for unarmed bank robberies. In his twenties, the manic-depressive, intelligent, ever-rattling Paul lost his head to drugs and philosophy, one of his former friends says in the film, and subsequently really lost his way. Today, Paul has no friends left; even his mother does not want to see him anymore. Jonathan decides to capture the vicissitudes of his boyhood friend on film, but in executing this plan he is promptly driven into a corner, because Paul’s problems are too aggravating for him, too. In the film, we follow Paul from his release from prison up to his hospitalisation in a mental clinic. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)