Wayfaring Stranger

Wayfaring Stranger charts the life of an itinerant character, embodied by seven per formers, across seven days, representing seven decades. Running from the city, through post-industrial edge lands and manicured enclaves, they find themselves in forests, farms, mountains and the shore. Along the way, they undergo a transformation, through the seasons and changing geography, both physically and emotionally, from youth to elderhood, and from a single, alienated being into an accepted element of the wider world. Each ‘day ’ is a ‘station’ that signifies a turning point in a character’s emotional development : from escape, through loss, grief and waywardness, to solidarity and co-existence.

Filmed in landscapes marked by centuries of ceaseless, often destructive, human interaction, Wayfaring Stranger asks what it takes to find a liveable life on one’s own terms and without conflict with others and the environment.

Director's Statement:
Wayfaring Stranger explores and embodies the search for what it means to live on one’s own terms. It’s a film about (not)being seen, and the life-long journey towards self-determination, but from within the world we inhabit. In films like Vagabond (Agnès Varda, 1985) or Mouchette (Robert Bresson, 1967), the character who is surviving against the odds seems not to be allowed to keep living on their own terms. In the history of film, female-presenting characters are often killed off by the last act. The end is inscribed. I want to show something different. I’m more positively influenced by Barbara Loden’s 1970 film Wanda. She wrote, directed and starred in this groundbreaking work based on her lived experience. She made the film on her own terms, and that’s what I’m interested in.

At its core, Wayfaring Stranger proposes an otherwise of being, a radical refusal of what only is. We are not fully human unless we acknowledge we are in and of the world. Everything we encounter in the film reinforces this central idea.

Through filmmaking I seek the poetry of precise and multi-dimensional observation, and, in Wayfaring Stranger, I want to bring to the forth this layered experience of being. The film pushes cinema as a somatic, experiential encounter and moves at a bodily pace. Each scene expresses a physical reality, manifesting the interior life, and threads it to the larger world.

Wayfaring Stranger aims to offer a new perspective on life – one that emerges from a marginalised origin – seeking the right to assert a full presence in the world and define what survival means on one’s own terms.

• https://iffr.com/en/iffr/2024/films/wayf...
• https://thewappingproject.org/commission...
• https://www.fugitiveimages.org.uk/projec...