Why Bennie tried to disappear, and what happened when he was found decades later

As a young man, Bennie Wint found himself living what he now views as a less than wholesome and fulfilling life: addicted to drugs, owing money to the wrong people, with few real friends, and in what he considered to be an unhappy relationship with his fiancée. In this short from the Swedish filmmaker Jesper Wachtmeister, Wint gives a rare interview recalling how, in 1989, he fled his life in South Carolina during a powerful tropical storm, relocated to Alabama, and assumed a new name – leaving authorities to believe that he had drowned, and giving himself the rare opportunity to get clean and start anew. As a first-person retelling, the perspective in the film is inherently a narrow one – the voices of the daughter and fiancée he left behind are absent, for instance. Nonetheless, Wint provides a deeply captivating account of how his true identity would be discovered in 2009, making the national news, and offers a glimpse into how he remade himself in the process of starting over.

Reset: Bennie is part of Wachtmeister’s film project to document stories about ‘the art of disappearing and the consequences of starting over’, which includes the instalment Reset: Lucy.