Farewell

Constructed entirely of archive footage, Farewell is the story of English journalist Lady Grace Drummond-Hay. In August of 1929, two months before the stock market crash would plunge the world into the Great Depression, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst added Drummond-Hay to the passenger list of the Graf Zeppelin as the only female. This impressive airship would be the very first to make a voyage around the world. For this prestigious project, a symbol of hope and progress, Hearst was looking for someone who wanted to write about the trip "from a female perspective." Drummond-Hay was ecstatic: "I shall write for him as if my life depended on it." Under the supervision of her colleague and ex-boyfriend Karl Henry von Wiegand, she spent 21 days reporting on the flight, which started in New York and went to Friedrichshafen, Tokyo, Los Angeles, and ended back in the Big Apple. Needless to say, it was a trip that did not go off completely without a hitch. Using Drummond-Hay's diary entries and newspaper articles as a basis, the film sketches a picture of the occasionally tough journey and a changing Europe. Drummond-Hay makes the viewer part of her impressions of the devastated continent. She tells of the funeral wreaths thrown from the Zeppelin over Verdun, riots in Berlin, and the rise of Communism in Russia, struggling with feelings for her ex-boyfriend all the while. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)