(By Angela Zimmerman)

A lot of people have fucked up parents. As cinematic subject matter, the emotionally resonant relationship between father or mother and son or daughter has been explored and dissected more than a few times; but each story is unique, a product of the singular environment surrounding it, the result of real-life characters and choices. Filmmaker Kaleo La Belle's Beyond This Place, which was screened last night at the Castro Theatre with a live musical score by Sufjan Stevens and Ray Raposa of Castanets, is an affecting portrayal of a broken relationship between father and son, an intimate family portrait that also acts as a microcosm into the consequences of that not-so-distant psychedelic age when acid was still revolutionary and children fled to communes to live without rules. Well, those children have gotten older, and Beyond This Place offers a look into one aging hippie general and the consequences his freedom filled lifestyle had on the child he abandoned for it.

Most attendees arrived over an hour early to the sold-out screening to claim a seat in the 1,400 person theater, and the waiting game—as well as the big musical names on the marquee outside—bestowed a sense of importance and fanfare to the event, which was to conclude with a Q&A with the director. After a short introduction of Stevens and Raposa, who took seats at the far left of the stage with a smattering of instruments close by, the film began with Kaleo La Belle’s spare narration and camera footage of the Pacific Northwest… the setting where father and son reunited after many years to take a bike trip together, where filmmaker Kaleo sought long-awaited answers from the subject he set out to explore.

Father Cloud Rock (ne Gordon La Belle) is a remarkable subject for a film, any film, and as a father figure candidly presented on screen, documentary footage doesn't get much
better. At 70 years old (or near that) Cloud Rock is an avid cyclist, dropping psychedelics
in the middle of their 76 mile loop through Washington State, and a relentless talker, waxing on about life, love, drugs, and nature for long, uninterrupted stretches. It is Cloud Rock's shun of the “conventional” lifestyle (one hampered by responsibility) that son Kaleo seeks to find an explanation for during their time together. 30 years ago, Cloud Rock left his family and essentially never looked back, writing occasional letters but never sending money or taking any sort of real role in his son’s life. And for Kaleo, that (rightly) stings. Together, filmmaker and audience wait for Cloud Rock to atone. But does he ever hold himself accountable? Hardly. He cheerfully blames Kaleo for not trying hard enough to see him and Kaleo's mother Marjie for not instigating more visits, and keeps deflecting back to his own father issues when he feels assaulted by Kaleo's line of questioning. All the while, Stevens and Raposa paint a beautiful score that accentuates the depth of Kaleo's mission and the pain underscored beneath.

Cloud Rock and Marjie lived together on a commune in Maui and conceived Kaleo (birth name Ganja) among the primordial days of the psychedelic revolution. As forerunners to the hippie movement, the members of the commune had lives colored by open sex and open drugs in paradise. But well beyond those days of burgeoning social revolution, which many members, including Marjie, eventually abandoned, Cloud continued to infuse his days with the personal freedom he grew to live by, relinquishing none of those freedoms as he aged, even still claiming, when pressed by Kaleo, that drugs are his religion and sit at his altar—their importance can not be underestimated.

The bicycle trip between father and son is interspersed with footage of Kaleo traveling elsewhere in the world in search of answers. He goes to Maui to speak with his parent's old friends to get a sense of what that time was like, and you couldn't script better characters. Bruce Stoner and Matt Westcott, Cloud’s lifelong friends, are charming and spacey, Westcott in particular candidly articulating the sentiment of those days by addressing their lack of commitment in the social context of the Vietnam draft. Kaleo goes to San Francisco to speak with Cloud and Marjie's friends Geoffrey and Sandy Gordon, who also shed light on their pursuit of communal enlightenment. Sandy's own daughter Gyana (whom Kaleo visits at her home in New Mexico) endured a childhood of pain and confusion that included eating a bowl full of LSD laced sugar cubes and being abandoned by both parents as they instead sought out their own paths of self-fulfillment.

Though Gyana fought her way out and today is raising a daughter of her own in a loving home, Kaleo's half brother Starbuck was not so fortunate. Kaleo finds him in Maui a homeless 29-year-old whose sense of reality has been shattered—by lack of familial stability? From being fed acid by Cloud Rock at a too-young age? Arguably, these things contribute to his mental illness, and Cloud, when asked about him, speaks callously to the problems Starbuck has faced and certainly takes no reasonability for any of it, basically writing his own son off as a nutjob. This is the most distressing scene in the film, for Starbuck is lost and alone and probably not coming back. Even Kaleo, upon their parting, gives him $300 and sadly admits he will likely never see him again.

Though Cloud Rock is frustrating, he also shines with light and laughter, always on the brink of a smile and too blissed out and full of love to ever really lose his cool. Kaleo favors long close-up camera shots of his father, as though searching deep in his eyes for a sense of accountability that he never really gets. He utilizes a hand-held camera on their bike rides, so as the viewer you become a part of the scene, taking it in from the eyes of Kaleo. In fact, until the very end of the film, when father and son pose side-by-side for a victory shot when they reach the top of Spirit Lake, we only get one bare profile shot of the filmmaker, when his father comes in for a hug and Kaleo tilts the camera slightly to capture their embrace. Otherwise, Kaleo is entirely off camera, present in voice only, so the empathy he creates for his situation and the understanding we gain with him through this journey is one of the most powerful aspects of the film.

Beyond This Place is a poignant and heartrending documentary, but it's not without comic relief, drawn mostly from the earnestness of the colorful characters. When Cloud spouts on about how people that “eat crackers and read their little black books are full of shit” the theater erupted in laughter, just as when the narrator, at the end of a long and searching sequence, asks himself in disbelief, “What is this fucking love I feel for Cloud Rock?” In fact, it’s that love, surprising and ever-present as it turns out to be, which sums up the tone of the film. Cloud Rock may have been an absent father, but he lives the only way he knows how—by his own definition. And as a result, he is charming, affectionate, and even strangely inspiring. And it is only when Kaleo sheds the burden of expectation from his father and allows himself to move beyond it that he attains his own self-discovery. And for a filmmaker, watching a packed theater full of people bearing witness to his own transcendent journey with the father he strove for so long to understand must be the best way to ultimately find the clarity that he was never able to find on his own.