Director: Robert B. Weide and Don Argott
127 Mins / 2021 / USA

40 years in the making, KURT VONNEGUT: UNSTUCK IN TIME is an incisive, touching and dazzling tribute to the life and work of one of the 20th century’s most brilliant and much loved literary voices, best known for the time-travelling adventures of Billy Pilgrim Slaughterhouse Five.

Young filmmaker Robert Weide met Vonnegut in 1982 after writing him a fan letter and pitching the idea of a documentary. Weide and Vonnegut regularly met for filmed discussions and became close friends before Vonnegut died in 2007. Fourteen years later, Weide (alongside co-director Don Argott) has edited his raw footage and rare archival material into a deeply personal and revealing portrait of a man who attained rock star-like status at 47 before falling from favour and rising again. It spans his childhood in Indianapolis, his experience as a Prisoner of War in World War II, his marriage, family, and divorce, his early careers as a publicist car salesman, and his long years as a struggling writer until he attained rock star-like status in 1969 with the publication of Slaughterhouse Five before falling from favour and rising again.

Although KURT VONNEGUT: UNSTUCK IN TIME is is first and foremost a biography of a writer, past, present, and future cease to become linear as Robert Weide strives for an overview of not only his subject’s life but his own role in it. The result is an absorbing and revealing portrait of friendship, entwined lives, creativity and artistic vision. brimming over with literature, life, death, humour, and love.

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