Trailer

ISLES OF ILLUSION - Letters from the South Seas

Weary of his life in Victorian England, teacher Robert J. Fletcher went looking for Stevenson's trail and beauty in the South Seas in 1912. Until 1920 he wrote his friend Bohun Lynch in Oxford from the New Hebrides, called Vanuatu after independence in 1980. Letters and diary entries reminiscent of the traveling Rimbaud are pitiless, personal, poetic, ethnographic and have a grim humor. Lynch published the letters after Fletcher was declared missing. No one knows when or where he died.

In 'Isles of Illusion' actor Ulrich Wildgruber takes time off from the theatre and lands on Vanuatu 75 years after Fletcher. He is under the spell of the letters from the South Seas, and the book acts as treasure map on his search for Fletcher's world. In adventures and encounters, often similar to those found in the letters, he develops a personal relationship to the author and the islands. In the end he makes an astounding discovery about Fletcher's fate.

Credits

Feature Film, Germany 1987, 78 Minutes

Cast: Ulrich Wildgruber, Helen Mafua, Mikael, Kirk Huffman, Norman Shackley, Joan Omawa, John Drake, Salome Zeitler, Willie Roy
Directed by: Herbert Brödl
Written by: Jobst Grapow, Herbert Brödl
Photography: Jörg Jeshel
Editor: Margot Neubert
Sound: Steve Mac Millan
Production Manager: Chris Strewe
Assistant Director: Angelika Krantz
Produced by: Baumhaus Film Brödl

Festivals

1988 Berlin, Saarbrücken, Angra do Heroísmo

With the support of HR, BR, ORF