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Arts + Lifestyle

Exploring solo travel - 'Wanderlust' The Film

Citizen Femme sat down with María Pérez Escalá & Anne von Petersdorff, the creators of documentary film “Wanderlust, foreign bodies in transit”.

It is an autobiographical documentary by two women about their journey by land and sea from Egypt to Germany. Two women from different origins (Argentina-Germany) presenting two perspectives of the same trip. Crossing 13 borders and 14 countries they investigate the “female body in transit,” the way they relate to the people they meet, different landscapes and various cultural, economic and religious contexts. Through interviews between themselves and also with other people whom they met on the road, they explore their own experience as women travelers.

We’re so excited about your travel documentary. Can you tell us a little bit about the concept of the film?

It’s an autobiographical documentary about a trip that we did together, Maria (from Argentina) and I (from Germany). We travelled from Egypt to Germany and it took us about two and a half months. We travelled only by land and water.

Where did you get the motivation from to do a trip like this?

The motivation came from many different sides. One of the topics we wanted to look at is that, in a time when we are so connected and transportation systems seem to make our world so free of obstacles and so easy to glide through, we really wanted to focus on the materiality and physicality, not only of our bodies but of the places we passed through. The heat, the desert – everything that you cross through on a journey like this.

We also wanted to focus on the edges of countries, the fuzzy places of transition, the passage where one country turns into another. While air-travel allows you to kinda hop from one metropolitan center to the next, we wanted to explore the in-between spaces, so that’s when the premise was born to not take planes, but to travel close to the ground and map.

Finally we wanted to document the experience of women travellers. The journey from Egypt to Germany, via Israel, Palestine, Cyprus, Turkey and Eastern Europe provided a culturally, historically, and geographically diverse route to shed light on different aspects that influence the experience of women travelling, including cultural expectations, dress codes, language, political situations.  We also wanted to call attention to the borders we would come across, such as the politically charged borders in the Middle East, the Mediterranean sea as a geographical border, the divide between southern and northern Cyprus, the city of Istanbul – which bridges European mainland with the “Orient,” and the seeming dissolution of national borders as we entered the Schengen Area.

What made you want to make a documentary particularly about the female travel experience?

This was partly born out of frustration. We couldn’t find many travel films by women who did anything similar and when you look back at the history of travel representation it’s very male dominated. Even ‘Wild’ and ‘Eat Pray Love’ are based on autobiographical books by women, but they’re made by men.

I am not trying to say that a male director cannot represent a woman’s travel experience, but we wanted to show that traveling with a woman’s body is different from travelling with a man’s body. Accordingly, being a travelling woman behind the camera is different from being a travelling man behind the camera. I believe the intention to make this visible has less to do with creating a gender binary, and more with the wish to shed light on a perspective that is situated in a different place. Being a female filmmaker determines where you direct your gaze, where you stand, and from what standpoint you look at the world.

Did you face any obstacles as female travellers?

The obstacles and the advantages that we had really changed from country to country. Egypt was one of the more challenging places, not only because we were women travellers but because we were women travellers with a camera. In Egypt, you don’t see too many women in public places. We did obviously cover our shoulders and legs but you still stick out, people know that you don’t belong there. I found that it was almost like my camera served as a shield and as a mirror at the same time. A shield because I felt like filming protected me from – or rather diminished – the male gaze; at the same time the camera served as an eccentric mirror in which we also recognized our gaze, a fascination with everything that was unfamiliar to us.

Did you set out at the beginning of your trip with a plan or keep it spontaneous?

When we started, we knew that we wanted to get from Egypt to Germany, but we had no idea which way we would take. Whether we would take a boat from Egypt straight to Cyprus, or anything else.

What do you want to achieve with this film?

We want to encourage women to travel, as well as calling awareness to the topic of the woman traveller and her representation in mainstream media. When we tend to hear about female travellers it’s always a very victimised approach, we often hear about them falling victim to sexual violence or violence in general, or commercially we have the aesthetization of the female body as a desirable object or find her appropriated for consumerism.

So, what happens next for your film?

We are sending it to festivals. We hope to finish the post-production in about a month or two and we are sending it to the first film festivals then.

What is the lesson that you want women to take away from it all? And what have you learnt as a traveller and filmmaker? 

Among many things related to my professional development as a filmmaker, I feel like I have been able to expand my intellectual empathy capacity by putting concrete examples to abstract ideas and places. This has a lot to do with the collaboration and sharing this travel experience with Maria. I knew in the abstract that a woman from a different cultural background, a different ethnicity, who speaks a different language might have a different experience than I would crossing borders. However, it was not until I lived through some of these experiences with María and worked through them in an attempt to translate them into aesthetic representations that I felt I understood them on a deeper level.

I hope that the film can take away some of the fears that might hold some women back from travelling. There are tedious moments, sad moments, and hard moments, but it’s all worth it. And we want to give women the encouragement and motivation to speak about their experiences as female travellers, no matter what they may be.

For more information about Wanderlust visit their website.

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