Desc: American Abstinence: Directed by Max Viktor Herbert. On 11 May 2016, I counted 296 things from the United States of America in my life. I did without (almost) all of these things for (almost) a month. For a total of 35 days, I accompanied myself with a compact-camera. I only realized the true extent of my asceticism during shooting. Not only tangible things constitute the representation of the USA, but also American pop culture and all means of modern communication, including the internet. American culture with its post-industrial achievements and innovations has become a kind of ersatz religion for many people, including myself. These insights exposed the naivety of my original idea. It became a challenging task to become an American recluse from one day to the next. The 70-minute documentary film American Abstinence describes my attempt to cope with this task. Werner Herzog's Of Walking in Ice and Michail Lermontow's A Hero of Our Times rescued me for the first week, but reading texts about great, suffering men was not a sustainable substitute for my actual main problem: my apparently truly existing internet and communication addiction. And so a film about abstinence became an amusing insight into my personal life and my doomed attempt to be abstinent.