Florian Fricke

The film follows Kaspar Hauser, who lived the first seventeen years of his life chained in a tiny cellar with only a toy horse to occupy his time, devoid of all human contact except for a man who wears a black overcoat and top hat who feeds him.

During World War II, three German soldiers are withdrawn from combat when one of them, Stroszek, is wounded. They are assigned to a small coastal community on the Greek island of Kos while Stroszek recuperates. The men become increasingly stir crazy in their uneventful new assignment. Stroszek eventually goes mad.

The holiest mountain in Asia, in a far away corner of west Tibet, amidst wild and ragged landscape, nearly entirely cut off from the rest of the world, is called Kailash. For the pilgrims of four religions this 6675m high mountain is the ‘throne of gods’, or ‘navel of the world’ – a place where the divine takes an earthly shape. For thousands of years pilgrims have travelled to this place to worship the mystery of the mountain circumnavigating it on foot. The path around Kailash is an archaic ‘path of initiation’. Florian Fricke and filmmaker Frank Fiedler (also an original founding Popol Vuh member) made their own spiritual trek along this path and documented the journey. Accompanying epic landscape scenes in the film is the music of Florian Fricke and Popol Vuh, spiritual music inspired by this unique journey.