Dennis Kailing was able to show his travel film to 66,000 viewers in the Corona year.
Do not give up. Look for solutions. One door closes, another opens. This is what Dennis Kailing from Gelnhausen in Hesse thinks today. He set out on his bike in the summer of 2015, was on the road for 761 days, traveled to 41 countries and covered a distance of 43,600 kilometers. The autodidact filmed, edited and produced his travel film “Besser Welt als Nie”. And then wrote another book about the adventure. All in all, Dennis Kailing worked on it for two years – the documentary then started in the cinema on February 13, 2020. Exactly one month later, the 29-year-old describes it on the phone, the cinemas had to close due to Corona. It was a “painful process to realize that I had lost,” he says. And: “You couldn’t be angry with anyone.” He was stunned for a few weeks – but “I was still hoping somehow. And I decided not to offer the film online”. A right decision. Because on April 20, Kailing showed “Better World than Never” in the Dortmund drive-in cinema. The first inquiries from him and the Meuser film distributor to drive-in cinema organizers had little success. “They first wanted to show all the blockbusters in the cinema,” says Kailing. After all, nobody knew him and his documentary. But Dennis Kailing had a trump card up his sleeve: “I offered director visits on site. That then had an additional event character.” May and June were drive-in cinema time, then open-air cinema time in July and August. He had 138 film conversations in the corona year, 66,000 people were able to see his bike ride around the world on the big screen. Now comes the evaluation on DVD and Blu-ray Disc. Dennis Kailing says: “2020 was somehow my year.”
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