Produced, Written, & Directed by Neal Livingston, 1995
IMAGINE… being in your garden, in the autumn, free to do whatever you want. Then walking back to your house you see a bunch of butterflies, and they start talking to you, and tell you that like them, you should migrate, take off for awhile.
WELL… if you’re like me you would go home and think … too weird, butterflies talking to me. Then again how do you figure out who to listen to.
SO… you go to town, which is Mabou, on Cape Breton Island, on Canada’s East Coast, to get the mail, and meet one of your friends, Mark, who has just bought a VW van and is leaving soon to drive … you guessed it , across the country.
BUT… how do you make up your mind to go, and what happens when you go?
Thus begins, the co-autobiographical road movie Licking The Window, a journey of many portraits including self-portraits. A comic, eccentric, hip and serious exploration of being stuck somewhere between Jean-Paul Sartre and Jack Kerouac.
“Cape Breton-based filmmaker Neal Livingston’s latest documentary is a psychedelic road movie about restlessness, breakfast recipes, the usefulness of male nipples, and other assorted sundry. In other words, it’s a probing examination of the psyche in winter. Witty, irreverent, indulgent and self-mocking, Licking the Window confronts the filmmaker’s image of himself. The ensuing battle is entertaining, enlightening, and worth the trip.“
– Ron Foley MacDonald
Atlantic Film Festival
1995