Balloon Hats Bring Universal Laughter

Editor's Note: This post was written by guest contributor Benjamin Packard, who interns for Participant Media.

I met Addi Somekh when I was 11 years old. Addi is weird. It's not that easy for an 11 year old to distinguish weirdness in an adult. With Addi it was a breeze.

My older brother Daniel was home visiting from college and had brought Addi, who he met in the dorms. When my brother wasn't looking, Addi handed me a small sticker of a naked woman. That's when I fell in love with him.

Addi is one of the most interesting people I have ever met. So it came as little surprise when one day he told family and friends that he would travel the earth's surface for the next several years of his life making balloon hats for people he encountered on his travels. Initially he was met with skepticism:
"What's the point?" "What exactly are you trying to accomplish by doing this?" "Don't you feel that this is just another form of post colonial modernization?"

I don't know what Addi's response was to these questions. The guy just wanted to make balloon hats and stick them on people's heads.

universality from retainer films on Vimeo.

Addi picked up balloon twisting when he was 19. He spent the summer after his freshmen year of college at home and needed some cash to pay his car insurance. His friend Pete taught him to twist a couple balloon animals to bring in some dough. For the first time in his life, Addi found something he excelled in. The rest is history.

Since then Addi has made balloon hats for thousands of people. His top end clients include Oprah and Martha Stewart. But you're more likely to find him twisting balloon hats in homeless shelters or retirement homes for free.

Armed with a passport and some leftover bar mitzvah loot, Addi traveled to 37 countries with his friend Charlie Eckert. Charlie and Addi met at a party in New York and hit it off immediately. While hanging out together, Addi stumbled upon some photographs in Charlie's apartment that blew him away.
Charlie was a closeted photographer and hadn't even mentioned his interest in photography to Addi.
One night Charlie turned to Addi and said "We should travel the world making balloon hats for people."
For the next three years the two men encountered countless adventures.

When the trip was over, Charlie had taken over a thousand photos (this was before digital cameras). Through his travels around the world Addi quickly realized that regardless of the differences between cultures and people, everyone laughed. Whether he was twisting balloon for an Amazonian tribe in the rainforests of Brazil or a cattle rancher in Nebraska, everyone liked to laugh. And colorful tubes of inflated rubber on peoples heads was a universal crowd pleaser.

Addi uses laughter and joy to connect with people. He sees laughter as one of the universal human traits that connects us all. One day while editing some video footage for Addi I found some of the most beautiful photographs I had ever seen on his hard drive. There were thousands of stunning photographs of beautiful people from all over the world wearing balloon hats. I knew about his trip around the world but had never seen the photos. I asked Addi if I could turn them into a video slideshow and interview him about his experience. This is what we made...