There's something wonderfully simple about the premise of a road-trip movie. Someone needs to get somewhere. Preferably by a certain time. And preferably without the entire journey going spectacularly wrong.

​

Naturally, it usually does.

​

In Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Steve Martin's character has one seemingly modest ambition: to get home to Chicago in time for Thanksgiving. Unfortunately, bad weather, unreliable transportation and an endlessly talkative traveling companion conspire to make that simple journey a logistical nightmare.

​

In Midnight Run, Robert De Niro plays a bounty hunter tasked with delivering a fugitive accountant from New York to Los Angeles. What should be a straightforward assignment becomes a cross-country ordeal involving the FBI, the Mafia, rival bounty hunters, and two men who can barely stand each other.

​

And in Little Miss Sunshine, a dysfunctional family piles into a battered Volkswagen bus to get their youngest member to a beauty pageant in California. The destination is clear, but the journey forces the family to confront problems that have little to do with the road.

​

Three very different movies, but all built around the same deceptively effective storytelling device: give the characters somewhere they desperately need to be, then make getting there as difficult as possible.

​

The destination provides the objective. The deadline, when there is one, adds urgency. But it's the unexpected encounters, detours, setbacks, and changing relationships that make the journey worth watching.

​

There's another reason this structure works so well. On the road, characters are removed from their familiar surroundings and routines. They can't always walk away from the people they're traveling with, and they can't control what happens around the next bend. Sooner or later, their carefully laid plans collide with reality.

​

And that's when things get really interesting.

​

FORTE draws on this tradition of destination-driven road-trip storytelling, taking its characters across Europe on a journey where music, ambition, and the unexpected share the driver's seat.