17 Border Crossings

The history of passports, smuggling Kentucky Fried Chicken into other countries, and the peculiarities of airline security — it’s all covered in this miraculous, one-man saga that unpacks how the mundane details that govern global travel become the actual journey.

17 Border Crossings is a surreal sojourn that transports us to very real places: Hungary, Serbia, Morocco, Colombia, Holland, and Mexico, to name a few. In the deft, mischievous manner of a trickster, Thaddeus Phillips manages to float huge questions that surround the fraught migrations of our era.

With all the childlike curiosity and adult skepticism of monologist Spalding Gray and the theatrical wizardry of a Robert Lepage, Phillips takes audiences by the hand on a trip around the world and shows us that when we cross the imaginary lines that divide the world, the real borders come to light.