UK Premiere of Doug Hawes-Davis’ Visionary Documentary, THIS IS NOWHERE
kinoKulture, April 2003
by James Hollands

Welcome to camping in the 21st century.

Each year tens of thousands of travellers - a fraction of the estimated three million American “full-timers” on the road at any one point - steer their RVs ˆ recreational vehicles, ostensibly uber-motorhomes - into Wal-Mart parking lots to “camp” or “boondock” (camp without paying ) for a night or two. Just as they seek out national parks and historic sites, RV travellers have marked Wal-Mart stores as travel destinations, with the added security and safety a 24 hour supermarket with CCTV and free car-parking can provide.

Hawes-Davis, in this un-intrusive and subtly subversive film, suggests that these ‘Wally Worlders’ represent a new American community, one attuned to the predictability and homogeneity that the more than 2,500 Wal-Marts nationwide provide; hinting that this mutually evolved symbiotic relationship between multinational and human has created a new evolution of the species - from consumer to brand parasite.

Fascinating, humane, terrifying, futuristic and very, very, very wry, you’ll never go supermarket in quite the same way again.
On the other hand, now you know where to hock down on the road in the US…