Doc’s Kingdom
1987 / France, Portugal, USA / English, Portuguese / Color / 90 min / 35mm
Script: Robert Kramer
Photography: Robert Machover [Robert Kramer, uncredited]
Editing: Sandrine Cavafian, Christine Aya, Julietta Roulet
Music: Barre Phillips
Sound: Olivier Schwob, Vasco Pimentel
Lighting: Richard Copans
Exective Producers: Paulo Branco, Dominique Vignet
Producer: Antonio Gonçalo
Cast: Paul McIsaac, Vincent Gallo, Ruy Furtado, and others
Production Companies: Filmargem, Garance
Source: Slow Learner
The encounter between a father and a son, coming from one continent to another. Doc is a doctor who lives on the outskirts of Lisbon where Europe and the West slip into the Third World. He has been suffering from a disease that he caught during the war in Africa. He is disillusioned by now and is drowning his long-lost ideals in alcohol. Jimmy lives in the United States with his mother. When his mother dies, he discovers a letter from his father, whom he thought had been dead for years. He takes off to look for him. At the end Doc and Jimmy meet, but will they have anything to say?
“Doc’s Kingdom gets back into my material: the USA, a home, a homeland, what you are inevitably a part of and what you are forever outside. It was also the first time working with Paul McIsaac since 1968. Twenty years ago we began Doc’s story in Ice, a chronicle in which Paul plays the leader of a mythical underground revolutionary organization. And Doc’s Kingdom is a prelude to Route One/USA.”
—Robert Kramer (Festival Cinema Giovani 1997)
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• Robert Kramer Retrospective | FALN | In the Country | The Edge | Ice | People’s War | Milestones | Scenes from the Class Struggle in Portugal | Guns | A Great Day in France / Birth | As Fast as You Can | Fear | Doc’s Kingdom | Route One / USA | Dear Doc | Berlin 10/90 | Video Letters: Robert Kramer and Stephen Dwoskin | Leeward | Point de départ / Starting Place | Walk the Walk | The Coat | Ghosts of Electricity | SayKomSa | Cities of the Plain | Against Forgetting |