Rocaterrania Screening

Celebrating the Revolution by Renaldo Kuhler

Greensboro film-maker Brett Ingram’s new feature-length documentary explores the secret world of long-standing Raleigh resident Renaldo Kuhler. Kuhler, now 77 years old, recently retired from his position at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences where he worked as a scientific illustrator since 1969. The focus of the film is not Kuhler’s lavishly detailed scientific illustrations, but his renderings of an imaginary nation in upstate New York. Kuhler had kept this world, which he calls Rocaterrania, a secret for fifty years but slowly revealed his watercolors, drawings, and notebooks filled with histories and his own devised language to Ingram. Ingram began shooting the film in 1997, which it saw its debut on Feb. 28 at the Cinequest Film Festival in San Jose, Calif. Beginning in October, the film will also be featured as part of a year long exhibit at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore.

An excerpt from a New York Times article describes Kuhler’s secret world:

He retreated into his imagination and began to create the private refuge that became Rocaterrania, a tiny sovereign nation in New York State along the Canadian border. He gave it a detailed history of tyrannical despots at least partly inspired by his parents, and populist uprisings reflecting his own struggles for autonomy. He developed its language, Rocaterranski, and designed its alphabet. It has its own small version of Paris, Ciudad Eldorado, with its own eclectic style of architecture, and its own fashions, which inspired Mr. Kuhler’s outfits.

See the trailer below:

Rocaterrania will screen at the Museum of Natural Sciences at 7 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 15. Doors open at 6, and members of Shark Quest, the Triangle-area band that scored the film, will play a short set at 6:30. Tickets are free. For more information, visit naturalsciences.org. It will also screen Tuesday, Aug. 25, at 7:30 p.m. at the Fearrington Village Barn in Pittsboro, as part of ChathamArts’ 100 Mile Sustainable Cinema Series. Tickets are $5; visit chathamarts.org.

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