Wayfaring Cinema Collective

The Wayfaring Cinema Collective (WCC) was founded by Andrea Luka Zimmerman, Christo Wallers, Vanessa Scully and Liam Scully in May 2025.

For immediate release: 20 August 2025
THE WAYFARING CINEMA: THE NORTHERN TOUR Saturday 20 September to Wednesday 24 September 2025
Featuring striking new and recent films by Jarman Award-winning film-maker Andrea Luka
Zimmerman, 2024 Turner Prize-nominated artist Delaine Le Bas and acclaimed writer and
“An energising, participatory and path-making new development in imaginative film exhibition,
bringing people, place and purpose together in socially engaged and ecologically sensitive ways
through the magic of travelling cinema, with films shown under the stars. Always fully inclusive, a
warm and stimulating welcome - thinking and being outside the box - is guaranteed.”
– Gareth Evans, Moving Image Curator, Whitechapel Gallery (2012-23)
London Review of Books Screen / Special Projects

The purpose of the Wayfaring Cinema’s first tour was to test a new model of cinema provision in an age of increasing social-media-induced polarisation

The Wayfaring Cinema pbrought people together in person around fire, film, food and conversation to enjoy being
together and to better understand one another through conversation and creative discussion.

To meet the need for cultural solutions to contemporary challenges in our environment, neighbourhoods, economies and public spaces, the Wayfaring Cinema stands as a model for a
different way of ‘doing’ culture. Rather than costly and resource-intensive venues, the
Wayfaring Cinema offers an environmentally sustainable, lightweight and versatile way of
bringing cinema to communities.

Formerly known as the Thamesmead Travelling Cinema, this wagon cinema was made from within the Thamesmead community, honouring especially Gypsy, Roma and Traveller (GRT) ways of life that has been present at Thamesmead since before the estate was built. The cinema features in my film Wayfaring Stranger (2024, 69mins). An Arts Council England Grant in June 2025 enabled us to move the cinema to The Good Cave Project at Burnlaw, hold a series of workshops with young people, and a subsequent tour in the Northern England in some of the most deprived areas in the UK.
The WCC, with all its members present thoughout, developed a pilot of community engagement, intergenerational and relational encounter though cinema, food and facilitated conversations. The WCC tested nomadic distribution and event-making, embodying new possibilities for mutual meeting and the exploration, culturally and socially, of different freedoms and desires.

The WCC toured Wayfaring Stranger (2024, 69mins), by Jarman Award-winning artist and cultural activist Andrea Luka Zimmerman, alongside works by Turner Prize-nominated artist Delaine Le Bas and acclaimed writer Damian Le Bas.
The films and subsequent conversations consider freedom of movement, gendered security in the rural landscape, and the challenges facing minoritised cultures, particularly GRT life, as well as celebrating the importance of community in person.

The Wayfaring Cinema Collective are The Northern Tour, 2025:
SATURDAY 20 SEPTEMBER/ Abundant Earth, Durham, DH7 7RL
SUNDAY 21 SEPTEMBER/ Star and Shadow Cinema, Newcastle, NE2 1BB
MONDAY 22 SEPTEMBER/ Auckland Palace, Bishop Auckland, DL14 7NR
WEDNESDAY 24 SEPTEMBER/ Dodgson Wood, Nibthwaite Grange Farm, Lake District, LA12 8DB
The program unfolded in this way:
6:00 PM OPENS FOR FOOD & DRINKS
7:00 PM FILMS & DISCUSSION
10:00 PM – FINISH

FILMS

‘Gypsyland’ (2014) by Delaine Le Bas. A series of short films based in London, Peterborough, Bolton and Glasgow, between 2023-2014.
The video represents a symbolic reclaiming of places with identifiable Romani/Gypsy genealogies, but which today are emptied of its historical Roma tenants. Delaine Le Bas is among the most recognized artists of Romani background, building her artwork around the themes of nationhood, race, gender, identity and, especially, the issues of belonging and “othering”. Delaine is a cross-disciplinary artist creating installations, performances, photography and films, she is internationally recognised as a Romani and British artist, representing Roma in the first Roma Pavilion Venice Biennale in 2007 and was recently nominated for The Turner Prize 2024.

‘Realities Checked’ (2024) by Damian Le Bas. A series of short films , scripted by Damian Le Bas using the anonymised words of Romany and Traveller people interviewed for the Realities Checked project.

Damian Le Bas is a writer, filmmaker and visual artist. His first book The Stopping Places won the Somerset Maugham Award, a Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award, and was shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year. Damian is widely published as a journalist and poet and was recently appointed as a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

‘Wayfaring Stranger’ (2024) by Andrea Luka Zimmerman charts the life of an itinerant character, embodied by seven per formers, across seven days, representing seven decades.

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. Andrea Luka Zimmerman is a Jarman Award-winning artist and filmmaker whose multi-layered practice explores fragile refusals and counter memories, itinerant lives, human and otherwise, in relation to structural and political injustice

Funded by Arts Council England. Supported by Thamesmead Texas, Good Cave Projects, Fugitive Images and Calverts.

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