Go West, Young Man!

2003 marks the hundredth anniversary of the making of The Great Train Robbery, the very first western film. Dutch film makers Peter Delpeut and Mart Dominicus were inspired by this fact to make a nostalgic road movie in search of the remains of this once so powerful film genre. In Go West, Young Man! Delpeut and Dominicus undertake a cinematographic road journey to the icons of the western. What they find are the leftovers of a fading tradition. They visit old paintless film sets and meet craftsmen who live in the knowledge that their skills (wrangling, horse falls) will disappear in the years to come. They call upon famous locations in which they still sense the dramatic force that shaped the classics of the genre: the Grand Tetons which were the awesome backdrop for SHANE and of course Monument Valley, home of many John Ford westerns. A lively and often funny homage to a great film genre that inevitably ends as a bittersweet requiem.