Sam Klemke's Time Machine

As a creative teenager with a pungent sense of humor who itches to do something big with his life, Denverite Sam Klemke began filming annual "personal status reports" with a home-movie camera in 1977—and continued for the next 35 years. The resulting video diary outlines the lofty ambitions, (infrequent) achievements, and increasingly painful setbacks of the sometime caricature artist on Boulder's Pearl Street Mall, who—despite yearly pledges to make changes—struggles with unemployment, his weight, and his love life. A few years ago, he uploaded "35 Years Backwards Thru Time" to YouTube and became an unlikely viral sensation, garnering the attention of Australian filmmaker Matthew Bate, who saw in Klemke both a precursor to and the antithesis of today's selfie-obsessed status updaters. Bate set out to craft a documentary about "a man who is able to live in front of the camera in a very raw, uncensored way" (to quote the director's statement). Interspersing excerpts with old clips about a different sort of time capsule—the spacecraft Voyager 1, which contained records of life on Earth in the event of making contact with extraterrestrials—Bate allows Klemke's honest (not to mention often gritty, funny, and moving) chronicle of an imperfect life to unfold in ways that offer insights about ourselves as time passes on. (Denver International Film Festival)