Verona – Most of the time, Nicholas Hitchon goes about his life undisturbed: driving to his job at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, meeting with his engineering students, pursuing his research, taking karate classes to work out the kinks.
But every seven years, like certain insects or Biblical events, a film crew arrives. They are cheerful, professional and relentless. In addition to following him everywhere for a week – up UW-Madison’s picturesque Bascom Hill, down to his karate class – they repeatedly “ram a microphone in my face,” as Hitchon grimly puts it, and ask him about his family life, his progress at work, his dreams and his disappointments.