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In January 2024, Andrea Luka Zimmerman debuted their most recent feature, Wayfaring Stranger, in the quiet dark of Rotterdam’s Pathé cinema. In many ways, the film was designed to be seen in a room like this; its soundscape is intricate, slippery even, mixed for theatrical speakers and almost entirely free of dialogue, requiring the kind of meditative concentration that can only be found in the cinema. Experimental and sensorial, it is the type of film for which screening at a celebrated arthouse festival like Rotterdam might seem to be an end in and of itself. But almost two years later, the film found itself in a new kind of home, in a different kind of cinema altogether. Across four nights in late 2025, the Wayfaring Cinema – an odd structure made of reused materials, modelled after a bow-top caravan and bearing a rear-projected screen on one side and a stable-door bar at its end – made its way across the North-East of England towards the Lake District. Along the way, it held remote screenings under the stars and around campfires: by a cooperative farm in County Durham, in the grounds of Auckland Palace, along the shore of Lake Coniston, its audiences sharing food and conversation, watching the screen under a darkening sky, its projected images marking a temporary, unusual feature of each shifting, weathered landscape.

Wayfaring Stranger maps the life of an itinerant character. Embodied by seven performers, across seven days, representing seven decades, they move from the centre of the city out through its periphery, to forests, marshes, mountains, and the shore. As the world changes around them with time and the seasons, so do they, transforming with age and perspective, leaving behind the alienated child of the film’s first images to become a creature of the wider world; wayward but not disconnected. Shot in landscapes throughout the UK, some entirely wild, others marked by ceaseless, often destructive, human intervention, the film’s production reflects the ideas it  explores of escape and unruly (self-)discovery, but also of community. Pay attention around midway through the film, and you’ll see a familiar bow-top caravan structure, surrounded by revelers sharing food, drink, and music by a fire. The scene was filmed at an earlier iteration of the cinema, which showed films in public spaces in Thamesmead, an area long-denied any kind of arts infrastructure where people might meet and form community. The Wayfaring Cinema’s method of exhibiting the film then, makes for a parallel to the process of its creation; it may be the sort of film one expects to find opening at Rotterdam, but the Wayfaring Cinema’s screenings show that it can find no greater home than the very landscapes in which it was filmed, creating in turn the kind of community whose value it holds at its heart.

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How did the desire to make Wayfaring Stranger, in the way you made it, originate?

It’s something I’ve thought about a lot because of my new film While the Gods Were Busy with Another Child , and I think it’s been brewing for a long time to make a film that has no plot, where the female or non-binary character is allowed to survive on their own terms. Because in the history of cinema, they always get killed off, right? In Vagabond, Mouchette, Rosetta, always if the character takes freedom, they have to die.

My own background is quite full of neglect, and I’ve met so few people who have broken from their parents so early, who went through estrangement. Making a life within the film and art world, which has become structurally so middle-class and privileged, was so strange. I was always mindful of this question: how do we encounter each other? We don’t know anything about each other, actually, but I believe so deeply in art as a means of encountering across difference, not just the repetition of clichés or stereotypes or tropes, especially because the world so often wants you to be definable, to be marked as this or that, as having experienced this or that, and that’s madness.

So I was trying to think through all of that, and then I decided to work with a character in different stages of life, to understand what is shared there also. I especially wanted to work with people who are older than me; because I don’t have a family, I was looking to the people I see who are so fully in life. Many were activists, or just very active in their creative practice, always making space for others; most are from working-class backgrounds; about half have come here from elsewhere.

I guess that was the important question: how can we make a life? and how can we imagine a life through other people? The interconnectedness of others’ lives is, for me, the most important thing in the film. I want a world that is liveable for all of us, for anyone. Our difference is good, and for those of us who have experienced being othered or not welcomed, I think we often strive for the world to be different, with an embodied knowing that it could be. You know when you feel comfortable with someone, right? And so you ask, is that structurally possible?

Often, we use plot to create causality, so I wanted to try and see what it would actually mean to move past that, to make the film a sort of collaborative thinking through life instead. In that way it was a deeply philosophical process, but risky, because it’s harder, the audience has to really watch, really engage with it. But it allows for huge conversations because the film is then a bit like a scaffolding, and the audience can project themselves into it.

The way you’ve recently exhibited the film, as part of the Wayfaring Collective, with screenings out under the stars, around campfires, reflects the film’s belief in finding different communities, and you touched on this just now, but I’m curious if that aspect was also present in how you approached the process of making it?

At the most recent screening, the facilitator we worked with called my filmmaking ‘intuitive’, and I’ve been thinking a lot about what that means. I met Tizzy Rose (who plays a supporting character in Wayfaring Stranger) through housing activism, through Liam and Vanessa [Scully] who were trying to support her. She asked what I was doing, I said I was making the film and she just said, ‘Can I be in it? I have an idea.’ The timing was right, the project was still open enough, and I just thought it was perfect, that this was someone who understood. If the film is about who sees you, who when you have nothing, when you’re nothing to no one, when you have nothing to give, sees you anyway, then Tizzy was that person. And because of her presence, Eirini (Ampatzi Ippikoglou, playing the iteration of the central character taken care of by Tizzy) spoke about how she had similar heritage to Tizzy, something she had never talked about, because it was so hidden in her background.

So, there are all of these conversations that I’m not necessarily a part of, which aren’t in the film, but which emerge because of the film, and so filmmaking becomes a kind of project of social relations. Those relations are, to me, what make everything possible, what make my imagination possible, because people can contribute, collaborate, can probe and question each other. And rather than me saying ‘this is how it is’, I can say ‘this is how I perceive it’, acknowledging that perhaps I see things slightly wrong because I see them from one perspective, and from another, things might be different. So there’s always a sort of clash, or a jarring, in my films, between different perspectives, which is the point where the audience comes in. That’s how I work to generate stories, but I’ve become more conscious of it now. It’s very intuitive to my process, this kind of unruliness.

With the tour, the point was to bring together conversation and different responses to the film and what it means to experience gendered violence in the countryside, to experience any kind of othering really: racism, homophobia, ageism, classism. Some of the screenings we held were in some of the most deprived areas of the UK, some were in self-organised community spaces, and what I found interesting was the generosity of the audience. My favourite audiences were always the ones that came by chance, who saw a cinema in a field and decided to come along, and then stayed, and we had conversations for ages after. I was so touched by those conversations. One person said, ‘I came here alone, I’m going to go home alone, but I want to be here and I’m not alone while I’m here.’ In a way it’s not even really about the film, it’s about making the environment, about making community in situ anew everyday, and not just having binary conversations around the expected things, but actual proper conversation. So on one hand you have the scaffolding of the film, which becomes an object of conversation, but then you also have food and shots of rum and the cold, so you feel the film viscerally too.

It’s so good to hear about these incidental audiences. Some in the film and art worlds certainly hold ideas about what sort of audiences the work is intended for, when in fact often, working in exhibition, you can find that the most exciting, open, interpretive reactions come from those who found their way to a work by complete chance.

And I really believe that! John Smith, the filmmaker, was my tutor, and he once showed a film in Newcastle, in a cinema where Star Wars, or something like that, was also showing at the time. The blockbuster had sold out, and so people wanting to see a film, without anything else to see, came to his film instead. He had a packed audience, and was thinking, ‘Oh wow, Newcastle really loves experimental filmmakers’, but really they all had wanted to see Star Wars! But they had such amazing reactions, and stayed for long conversations about the film afterwards.

Was the reception you got on tour markedly different from the kinds of receptions you had at film festivals and more ‘official’ screenings?

You know, the first screening we had was at the Thamesmead cinema, because we shot a scene there, and I always show a film in one of the places we shot it first, even if it compromises festival premieres. And what I found with the outdoor screenings is that people love the interruption of real life; for example in Newcastle, a night bus stopped nearby, and people started going ‘oh what’s going on down there?’ They question it: ‘Why are we outside and there’s a cinema next to us in a field?’

But it’s also difficult to speak categorically, because, for example, my film Estate, A Reverie was shown at the Tate, and the audience was full of working-class people because the ways in which I make films means that a particular audience comes. I make a lot of effort to invite people, with huge guestlists, and so I always get people at screenings who might not necessarily come to those spaces.

Once, during a pre-film Q&A at a screening in Portugal, I had a lot of questions about working with trauma, and because I’ve worked a lot with marginalised groups, I’ve done a lot of thinking and training on what is trauma-sensitive and agency-building when working with people. I think there must have been a lot of social workers in that audience because they were talking about boundaries, boundaries, boundaries, but my reaction is that we also have to go through, we have to be able to take a risk. This is art. So I think at the cinema people ask questions on process, whereas at the outdoor screenings I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a question about process; the audience talk more of themselves, their own experience, and I find that really interesting. Hopefully the best result one can have is that the work touches someone, no?

I’d also like to talk about your more recent film, Here and Not Here; it’s markedly different to Wayfaring Stranger in some ways, but between them there’s a shared concern of encounter between people and place, and the precarity of a certain way of life, a certain landscape. I wonder if the experience of making Wayfaring Stranger impacted your approach to Here and Not Here?

Here and Not Here was meant to be a really different work. With Salim Abu Jabal I run a no-budget film school in Ramallah, and doing that, I met loads of people and started working with them, including activists who I can’t film. So right from the beginning I made a decision to not film faces unless people were performers, or just really comfortable. And it’s interesting that you’ve asked this, actually, I’ve never even thought about it before, but in Wayfaring Stranger the character walks through their life, right? And this project was meant to be a sort of walking cinema; there would be different stations in different places and the audience would walk through, holding conversations, sharing food, hiking together. It’s very dangerous for Palestinians in the West Bank to go hiking, increasingly so now, so there are two or three groups that facilitate it, and it’s beautiful. Some of the younger people participating are shell-shocked by trauma, and so walk with headphones on the whole time, but it’s very, very gentle; it’s just being together and being able to walk in whatever configurations you like.

I was there in May 2023 to prepare the project, and the exhibition was going to be in November through to December, so obviously I couldn’t go. I also stopped making it, and focused instead on a book telling the different stories of the people I met, which will fundraise for lawyers for people in indefinite detention in Israeli prisons; there are so many people just kept forever, including my friend Abdallah. Later, I had a retrospective at the Nova Cinema in Brussels, and the next retrospective was going to be of Jocelyn Saab’s work, so they invited me to show rushes as part of that retrospective because they thought my way of working is like hers, which is to observe without judging. As a filmmaker you have a politics but you don’t say you already know what you’re going to see. Anyway, I showed the rushes, and the responses were so beautiful, I just thought, you know, it’s already almost there, so I’m making it. It’s a different film, but it’s based in the same intention, which was to make this collaborative, shared exchange. I was there so much, I have friends there, but I can come and go, whereas they can’t. I wanted to show all the little moments of their individuality bursting through because people say things about ‘Palestinians’ as a group, but Palestinians are also this person, and this person, and this person. Every single life is a different life.

Voice is typically very present in your work; in your most recent short, While the Gods Were Busy with Another Child, it’s your own voice, in Here and Not Here it’s your voice together with the voices of those you encounter, in Taskafa it’s that of John Berger. But in Wayfaring Stranger, voice is absent. Instead, there’s song, punctuating different chapters of the film. What made you go without it here? And then return to it with your more recent films?

You know, I did have a lot of narration for Wayfaring Stranger, by Eileen Myles. We improvised and recorded it all, and it was great – if I ever have an exhibition it will be its own piece of work. Eileen is such a great improviser, I just gave her prompts: ‘running away from trauma’, ‘being seen’, ‘being able to exchange’, ‘leaving that exchange and finding your own way again’. But then I did a screening for three or four people I really trust, and the response was that it was superfluous, it’s already said in the images. So either I would have had to have completely different images, or a really different narration. I sat with it a long time, and even tried recording a really personal one, like what you hear in the Gods film, but I thought it’s not fair that there are all these amazing people in the film, this multiplicity, and then I’m just reducing it to myself? So I had to trust that it didn’t need it, which is risky, and a step for me, but I’m really glad that I did it.

With Here and Not Here, I wanted to hold to account a little tiny element of our culture, and its responsibility to them. So it was important for me to say that, but to say it and show something else. Perceptive people will see that thesis, I think, and the narration is also published as a text in a psychoanalytic journal called Room.

Then with While the Gods…, I wanted to use language as a witness, but an unstable witness. I mean, it’s going to be scary when it comes out, but it’s a film not just about me, but about all of us who have been estranged and had to try and find our own way on our own terms. It’s also about how trauma changes when you get older, and so the film was a huge process for me, I needed to go to therapy to make it, but it had to be a film. Then I have to show it to people, though, and it can’t just be so personal, it also has to be about mothers who become mothers way too young, or why should mothers be just one thing. I hold this space for my mother also, you know, she was so vulnerable and fragile, and so was my grandmother. So I wanted to make all of these different points, say, ‘let’s look properly, let’s not be lazy’, and I wanted to use my voice, which I often hide, to say all of those things in a different way, say them instead of looking. This is why it’s a companion piece to Wayfaring Stranger for me. It says: ‘look, this is my experience, but it’s not my only experience, and because of these experiences my worldmaking is wayward and wild and I’m drawn to all those who are also like this, so you can see that evidence here, and let’s have a conversation about it.’ It’s another way of coming at it, that’s why it also had to be shorter, because with a feature you have almost a different responsibility to include the audience much more, or in another way.

What way do you think that is?

The works I’m drawn to are works where I can contribute to the telling of the story in my head; they make me think, or they make me drift off and dream and maybe I think about something I haven’t thought about before in the same way. I mean, hopefully While the Gods… is like that. Maybe it’s because in the film it’s me, that I had to use language, in order to estrange myself from myself. I’m still learning; it’s only in making a film about it that I’m learning to talk about it, only after the first screening am I learning how to speak about it.

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Andrea Luka Zimmerman is a Jarman Award-winning artist and filmmaker whose multilayered practice has been described as Intuitive Cinema. It embodies and explores fragile refusals and counter memories, and itinerant lives, human and otherwise, in relation to structural and political injustice. They co-founded the Wayfaring Cinema Collective and cultural collectives Fugitive Images and Vision Machine (collaborators on Academy Award® nominated feature documentary The Look of Silence).

Lydia de Matos is a writer and filmmaker based in London. Her writing has been published by the Open City Docs, InReviewOnline and the Independent Cinema Office.

Image credit to Elam Forrester for headshot of Andrea Luka Zimmerman.

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