On the Trail of Easy Rider: 40 Years On... Still Searching for America
2025
"A man went looking for America.... And couldn't find it anywhere!" proclaimed the original Easy Rider poster. Four decades later filmmakers Simon Witter and Hannes Rossacher set out to see if they could find America, retracing the film's original route across the country with Easy Rider super fans Jim Leonard and Mike Kittrell, on a quest to find out how the many issues that resonated through the film had developed, for better or worse, in the interim. Along the way they met musicians, journalists, academics, seasteading idealists, drug policy experts and healers, and heard from the film's makers and extras about the dramatic genesis of the cult film that blew like a wind of change through the stilted kitsch of mainstream cinema in 1969, re-writing the rulebook on genre, drugs, music, cinematography and even the use of non-actors, holding a mirror up to the values of a changing America.
