Go Further

An “Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test on Tofu” is how Ron Mann describes his
film. This comment is a reference to Tom Wolfe’s book about Ken Kesey, author of “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and his legendary, drug-filled bus trip across the USA with the “Merry Pranksters” at the end of the sixties. More than thirty years on, Hollywood actor and environmental activist Woody Harrelson sets out on the same journey. For his trip, Harrelson and a group of friends known as the “Merry Hempsters” chartered an environmentally-friendly bus and set off along the Pacific Coast Highway.
Harrelson – last seen fighting for the legalisation of marihuana in Ron Mann’s previous documentary, GRASS – is convinced that social change is always the result of an individual’s efforts. For this reason, Harrelson’s bus trip is full of encounters with people whose approach to life and making a living are somehow exemplary. Hence, we meet a paper manufacturer who doesn’t chop down trees; an organic farmer who regards the environment as his natural partner and a university lecturer who teaches other activists how to use humour as a strategic weapon. For Woody Harrelson, the attitudes of these people are the first steps in the right direction towards improving the current state of the planet. “Naturally, we need to go a lot further”, says Harrelson in this documentary, at the end of which the viewer is comforted to learn that “No hippies were harmed in the making of this movie.”