A Forgettable Man

This is the story of David, an American photojournalist, targeted to become a martyr by revolutionary ‘friends’ in a dysfunctional, immediately pre-Arab Spring, tin pot dictatorship. David engages in a tense emotional and physical struggle to cope with the treachery, to accept that he must act and then to do so. The events take place across about 17 hours; the clock is ticking; this is a thriller. The story is inter-cut with memories of his first 17 years of growing up in the American Midwest and his efforts to escape his uncultured, unloving and oppressive family and city. He strives as a child to comprehend the world around him, to make sense of the senseless violence meted out against him by his brother and others, to cope with his father’s silence and frequent hostility, to grasp all the knowledge he can, and to become a photographer as a way of finding redemption. Like most children brought up without love, he struggles to overcome his sense of worthlessness. He believes that by using his camera to show people what lies hidden under the stones, he can rationalize his existence. Exposing truth and providing it to others becomes his mission and the thing that drives him to wind up in the desert hell he is trying to escape. He hardly lives his own life but rather observes others. He is a rebellious, perpetual outsider. It is a journey of political, intellectual, artistic and emotional turmoil, passionately told. Throughout his efforts to escape, the tale of his love for a woman in Sarajevo at the beginning of the Bosnian War is woven into his memory. As he confronts his likely demise, he continues to try and grasp what life means.

This is the story of David, an American photojournalist, targeted to become a martyr by revolutionary ‘friends’ in a dysfunctional, immediately pre-Arab Spring, tin pot dictatorship. David engages in a tense emotional and physical struggle to cope with the treachery, to accept that he must act and then to do so. The events take place across 17 hours; the clock is ticking; this is a thriller. The story is inter-cut with memories of his first 17 years of growing up in the American Midwest and his efforts to escape his uncultured, unloving and oppressive family and city. He strives as a child to comprehend the world around him, to make sense of the senseless violence meted out against him by his brother and others, to cope with his father’s silence and frequent hostility, to grasp all the knowledge he can, and to become a photographer as a way of finding redemption. Like most children brought up without love, he struggles to overcome his sense of worthlessness. He believes that by using his camera to show people what lies hidden under the stones, he can rationalize his existence. Exposing truth and providing it to others becomes his mission and the thing that drives him to wind up in the desert hell he is trying to escape. He hardly lives his own life but rather observes others. He is a rebellious, perpetual outsider. It is a journey of political, intellectual, artistic and emotional turmoil, passionately told. Throughout his efforts to escape, the tale of his love for a woman in Sarajevo at the beginning of the Bosnian War is woven into his reflections. As he confronts his likely demise, while fleeing across a stormy sea in a flimsy fishing boat, he continues to try and grasp what life means.

Robert Golden is an American born photographer/filmmaker working for many years in the UK. During the 1970's he co-authored and photographed a series of books and editorial articles about what turned out to be the demise of the British industrial working class. Having been born in Detroit he was sensitive to these issues. At the beginning of this century he shot 26 films around the world about food and culture and realized that he had photographed and filmed two bookends of the homogenizing processes of globalization, the first in industry and the second in agriculture and food production. Out of this came an exhibition called HOME (http://www.robertgoldenpictures.com/test/) which is about how jobs, community, family, customs and traditions - are destroyed by globalization. This is like a distant wind that sweeps across people’s lives, destroying much in its wake; a wind people can feel and see the results of yet have no real idea what the source of it is. He has written many film scripts, poems, a few plays, and has reached a point in life where he believes the novel is the form he can use to explain/cope with/resolve/express certain issues, hence having written A FORGETTABLE MAN