Hamilton Pevec: 19, Neo anti-systemic renegade gorilla filmmaker, writer, DJ, Actor and Hitchhiker with a non-violent vision of peace. I am intrigued by human relationships and motivated by the limitless diversity I encounter in my travels. I am currently assembling thumbing understanding. A feature length documentary about my first cross-continent hitch. Thumbing understanding is an accurate account of surviving a hash winter with nothing but a loaded backpack and a digital camera. I hit the road, Love driving me to confront my fears, to interview people who made a conscious decision to help a stranger.
The Subjects: thumbing understanding is filled with a continent of characters ranging from triple felons with penis enlargements on the run for love, transient bums who've hitchhiked their whole lives, fingers so chapped they've started falling off, Musicians this close to making it big, young people with guns and drugs, old people with stories of guns and drugs, beautiful women, truckers and their super sized subculture, hippies, farmers, soldiers, entrepreneurs, friends and family.
Hitchhiking: Thumbing understanding explores the endless possibilities of brief “stranger to stranger” relationships as experienced via hitchhiking. Hitchhiking is generally considered to be risky at best and is most often considered stupid and dangerous. A mass misconception. As a mode of transportation, Hitchhiking essentially forces two or more strangers into a trust relationship, with less than a few moments for judgment. This can be a very beautiful phenomenon. Each encounter of trust is unique and unpredictable and these are the same encounters offered by life that allow insight into human potential. Some of these events are virtually instantaneous , some quickly forgotten. Others, one wish, would last forever; those that yield deep insights into our own condition. Some of them positively affect our world view while others leave us longing for a better world. The need to progress and be at your next destination can cloud your judgment and open dangerous doors. Natural elements like winter cold and snow can dull the senses, leaving one vulnerable. I decided to discover for myself if hitchhiking really was as precarious an undertaking as I was led to believe by the media and the legends spawned. If we can over come our anxieties and preconceived, negative notions about hitchhiking, we might gain some valuable understanding into the evolution of mistrust, the eradication of hitchhiking as a culture and a clearer picture of the subtleties of human interaction.