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Kevin Merz, dir. Glorious Exit 2008. 75 Minutes. English and German (with English subtitles). Switzerland. ArtMattan. $245.00.
Kevin Merz's debut documentary feature, Glorious Exit, begins with a performance in the making. In close-up, we see the director's half-brother,Jarreth, putting on his makeup for the final staging of a theater production in Los Angeles. Although this show is coming to an end as the film begins, Merz's nimble camera captures the moment in order to focus onjarreth's next performance. Offstage, Jarreth's Nigerian father has died, and according to custom, Jareth, as the eldest son, must oversee his father's funeral in a village near Enugu. Yet Jarreth did not grow up with his father in Nigeria. Like Kevin, he was raised primarily in Switzerland by his mother, and then moved to the U.S. to pursue acting. The "return" to his chieftain father's African home entails adapting to a new role in a context that, for Jarreth, is as distant culturally as it is geographically. Merz makes the cultural dislocations Jarreth experiences on the trip to his father's funeral (his "glorious exit") the complex subject of a deceptively simple premise.
The conflict at the heart of both the film and Jarreth's journey quickly emerges as simultaneously financial and philosophical. While still in...