I Touched All Your Stuff Review: Great Storytelling

We all know that one really nice guy who lands a girlfriend that plays him like a harp and he’s oblivious to that fact. Enter Christopher Kirk, an American who found love in Columbia and got more than he bargained for. All this is in Maira Buhler and Matias Mariani’s newest documentary “I Touched All Your Stuff” which is fascinated to say the least.

In this documentary Christopher Kirk, incarcerated in a Columbian prison, recounts the events that transpired when he went to Colombia after hearing about Pablo Escobar’s hippopotamus. Everything from the time he met his Japanese-Columbian girlfriend “V” to finding out what kind of person she really is.

The subject matter itself doesn’t come across as all interesting. It is essentially about an easily manipulated guy who met a girl that was obviously trouble. Buhler, Mariani and Kirk do everything they can to make these events interesting and sure enough they do.

One of the things that make this interesting is that Kirk is an excellent storyteller. Whenever he recounts any of the events involving “V” or anyone associated with her is a work of professional storytelling. Once he opens his mouth, his voice and descriptions will leave you transfixed to every word he says. Once the movie’s over, you do develop the urge to go up to Kirk and tell him the same thing his friends told him about “V”: “what in the world were you thinking?”

One of the more recent trends in storytelling is using “Skype” and email. Though these techniques seem passé, here they’re pretty important to the bigger picture. Kirk had an 80-gigabyte hard drive that had all the pictures, pictures and emails about “V.” Of course, even this movie can’t figure out how to make these mundane things interesting.

There are two themes presented by the documenters: One is Kirk is similar to a hippopotamus and to Pinocchio. The hippopotamus analogy is just there to show that both it and Kirk are bold and stay in the water. Not that strong of an argument. The Pinocchio analogy is more befitting. He is this innocent, naïve little thing that gets easily controlled by someone pulling his strings. After hearing what “V” did to him, it’s easy to see these two can be similar.

“I Touched All Your Stuff” is a fascinating documentary helped by Kirk’s powerful ability to tell a story to a captive audience. While some of the techniques are questionable, this is still a documentary that should be viewed by any in order to understand the folly of romance.