Film review "New York - The world at your feet" about Matt Green

Stadtwanderer Matt Green
:
Sisyphos in New York

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New York State of Mind: City runner Matt Green looks out over Manhattan.
Foto: Happy Entertainment / filmkit on/Happy Entertainment / filmkit online

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The great cinema documentary “The world at your feet” accompanies Matt Green, who wants to pace all the streets of New York. The viewer first asks: Why is this guy doing this? In the end you can guess the reason.

Sisyphus was just as stupid. He rolled a stone up the mountain, the stone did not stay up, but Sisyphus went on anyway, day after day. At Matt Green, it’s not stone, it’s asphalt. The 39-year-old has set out to hike New York, street by street, and has now been on the road for eight years, and he cannot finish because there is still more asphalt. The American doesn’t mind that, he keeps smiling, he’s very gentle and just goes on, and that’s like Sisyphus: you have to imagine Matt Green as a happy person.

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The documentary “New York – The World at Your Feet” tells the story of this guy who has been walking through the city for so long and has covered almost 15,000 kilometers. He used to work as an engineer; It was a desk job, says Matt Green, and the way he says it you can tell how bad he thinks the place where a desk is almost always: inside. Director Jeremy Wortman clings to Green’s heels; in fact, the manic strollers outside are almost exclusively seen from behind, and the impregnable city towers in front of him: five districts, 8.5 million inhabitants, countless stories.

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You watch and think at first that this is really great: full contact with the city that never sleeps, metropolitan Baden, New York totally. But then, as a good employee, you immediately wonder how Matt Green manages it financially. Answer: You can send him donations through his homepage. He lives on $ 15 a day, eats beans with rice and salt instead of a sandwich with avocado and saffron. He doesn’t have an apartment, but stays with friends on the pool table or with people whose cats he takes care of. Once you see Green sitting in a children’s room, it obviously belongs to a girl, and between pink stuffed horses and rainbow-colored plush unicorns he lists the animals that he has already looked after: Miski, Skini, Ralph, Romy, Ed, Mafosa and Miss Kitty. If he ever doesn’t want to hike anymore, he could just do Cat Care. Would be enough to live on, he says. But that’s out of the question, he knows.

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New York is the whole world in this film. This city is not only made of stone, but also nature, one wonders where birds sing everywhere. Winter is unbelievably beautiful: the Hudson is under ice, the streets are glowing white – it makes you feel very lyrical. And the people: Green applauds them, they come from all countries and yet live in the same city. They hug him, some ask if he’s stupid, others how he’s doing it financially, and few ask what this crap is actually about. Green stops and answers, he casts a spell over his interlocutors, he is balanced like Buddha.

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Whereby the question is of course justified: What is this crap? Green doesn’t want to earn money hiking, write a book, or offer city tours. He just wants to go, and a visit to his parents gives him an idea of what he might be motivated by. They talk about the bicycle accident that their son had. He would have been dead if he hadn’t been wearing a helmet, they say. Shortly afterwards, Matt’s brother suffered a stroke, and it was also a hairpin. At that time, Matt saw that there were two options, speculates the father: live now or hope for the future forever.

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Once Matt Green meets a passerby and says that he initially thought he had been on the road for two and a half years: “That was five years ago.” Then the passerby laughs, he shakes with laughter, and Green laughs too, and then he walks on roll his stone. He pays attention to the little things, the plants, the many repurposed synagogues that are now churches. He notices the trend that hairdressers have recently started to like to decorate their shop signs with one or more Zs: “Hair Cutz”. And he writes everything on his blog “I’m Just Walkin ‘”, which is a kind of city guide, but a loving, crazy and free one.

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An ex-girlfriend and Green’s ex-fiancée both speak up, and they both say the fact that he never stood still ruined their relationships. He didn’t want to go to the cinema, he didn’t want to go to a restaurant, he just wanted to hike, and you notice once again that Green doesn’t just go, but also doesn’t want to stop because then the damned everyday life would begin. He is master of his days only when he walks; the city only belongs to him when he walks. It is a miniature world, a reality outside of time. The city map provides the order, the red lines of the routes that have already been walked structure life. This walking is a gesture of resistance in a city where everyone is running: the flaneur as punk. Walking hides this guy, one thinks, and one hopes that nothing and no one will ever stop him.

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This is how you see him doing the 8,000th mile. This mark was the golden line at the beginning of his hike: 8000 miles, then he would have made it to New York, he once thought. But the closer he got to that date, the more challenges he added: pacing every path in every park, every bank of every body of water, and so on.

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Matt Green will never arrive. Luckily.

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Film review “New York – The world at your feet” about Matt Green

Stadtwanderer Matt Green
:
Sisyphos in New York

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