Wayfaring Stranger

Andrea Luka Zimmerman is a Jarman Award-winning artist and filmmaker whose multilayered practice explores fragile refusals and counter memories, itinerant lives, human and otherwise, in relation to structural and political injustice. Her films ask how we might resist being framed exclusively through class, gender, ability or disability. Wayfaring Stranger is her fifth feature length film.

We are delighted that she will be present to introduce her film.

The film follows a wandering character, played by seven performers, from childhood to old age as they search for existence on their own terms. Zimmerman experiments with the fabric of genre and experience, investigating wordless encounters through a dynamic soundscape of field recordings by sound artist Chris Watson. The absence of dialogue is bookended by Fern Maddie’s singing and a spoken-word text by renowned American poet Eileen Myles. Sonic textures and extreme close-ups define the filmic journey; through industrial and rural landscape, familiar and foreboding, blending fiction and documentary into an ecosystem all its own.

This is a film about survival, resistance, and a refusal to compromise along the way. Its about finding one’s place within the ecosystem of the Earth, within the fragility of nature. The films proposes hopeful and tender encounters with people, place and other life worlds, shaped through attunement rather than exploitation, beyond social conventions that constrict and limit.