Director Jeff Bird
Rated E
Score 4/6

Afflicted with a serious blood cancer, former psychologist Paul Mutimer hits the road on a fun filled and hilarious adventure to buy a Kombi and explore the meaning of life.

Kombi Man is being featured in this year’s Melbourne Documentary Film Festival. I hope that there are more than a few of you out there who have decided to watch a movie, knowing nothing about it except that it had an interesting title. Any film festival is a great opportunity for something of a cinematic adventure because with Kombi Man director Jeff bird took me in a direction that I wasn’t expecting to go. I would have been perfectly content watching a documentary about the history of the Kombi. There was an interesting piece of filmmaking flair throughout the documentary where they would switch to what looked like a ‘home movie’ filter for parts of the stock footage. The interviews scattered throughout the movie where interesting though there is that part of me that would have loved to seen more from some of the interviews particularly with ‘Boinga Bob’ who looked like a person who had an interesting philosophy about life then of course there is the sections looking at the Buddhist and Hari Krishna that almost anybody would have found fascinating. Though to do a deep dive on those philosophies would have blown the runtime out well over the 85 minutes and have taken away the focus from Paul and his quest for a Kombi. I loved the line from Paul toward the end of the movie that was along the lines of ‘I wanna go there to see what I could find’ . It might come across as something of a cheesy connection but it made me think of the slogan for the ‘96 Atlanta Paralympics ‘the triumph of the human spirit’.