IDFA 2010 - Timothy Leary revived in The Terrestrials

Timothy Leary is not dead. The corpse of this colourful 1960s counterculture guru may have abandoned its occupant on 31 May 1996, but Leary's ash particles are orbiting the earth, his spiritual legacy is preserved on the internet and, if the rumour is true, a tape recording of him aboard Voyager II travels into the vast cosmos.

And now there is the film The Terrestrials by the long-time Dutchman René Daalder, who works in America. This homage to Leary, for which the terms 'intensified reality' and 'science fiction documentary' have already been coined, is one of the most eccentric and entertaining contributions to the Dutch competition at IDFA.

The Terrestrials is the loose home-movie-style filmed account of a group of students rediscovering the psychedelic ideas of Timothy Leary. Not only do they want to digitise his entire archive and put it on the internet (Leary believed that cyberspace was the next step in human evolution) but they are also doing their best to make Leary's mind-blowing insights their own. Leary was a psychologist who promoted the use of the hallucinogenic drug LSD and later dealt with life extension, computers, the internet and saw a future for humanity in space.

In the film, the students report on a drug-induced trip to Las Vegas, half-jokingly philosophise about the ultimate question you could ask an alien visitor and discover a bright orange lichen in the woods that could well be of extraterrestrial origin.

As a suspicious viewer, one might assume that all this is a brilliantly staged prank, a clever way of reviving the zeitgeist of the 1960s and 1970s before our eyes. Yet it seems to be less 'fake' than you might suspect. That digitisation project really exists, check out www.archive.org. Those students and their enthusiasm for Leary are not made up either, just like the archive footage of Leary himself, of course. Who, by the way, also had a good sense of humour, as evidenced by the priceless excerpt from a talk show in which he explains the difference between Republican and Democratic drugs.