In the book Heavy Time, Sonia Overall writes that ‘Pilgrimage, according to Pope Benedict XVI, is the stepping away from oneself in order to encounter God.’ And yet, not being religious, she reframes her own pilgrimage from Canterbury to Walsingham as a journey that allows a reorientation towards her sense of self. Overall’s contemporary model of pilgrimage is grounded in the practice of psychogeography, of walking as a mode of attention, writing as an imaginative curiosity, and embodied reflection as attunement to the habitually overlooked.

On her route she seeks not the miracles of a medieval pilgrim but ‘the everyday divine’, in a hope to find ‘pockets in the landscape where the membrane is so tightly stretched that other worlds might shine through.’[1] 

The three films that make up The Open Road are themselves portals to other worlds, ones which invite us to step away from what we know in order to contemplate the world through a reorientation towards landscape, self and community.

Amaal Said, Sam Williams and David Blandy were invited to respond to Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales—in which a group of pilgrims travel from London to Canterbury, sharing stories along the way—reimagining this age-old tale through moving image. Pilgrimage and storytelling sit decidedly at the foundation of these films, which branch out from one another and their shared point of departure as much as they echo one another’s concerns for belonging, dialogue and freedom. In this way, The Open Road extends and continues Chaucer’s collective narrative of journeying into the contemporary moment, while embracing Overall’s belief that pilgrimage, if it is anything, is a renewed sense of awareness to the world around us. 

Each of the films thinks of pilgrimage from a distinct perspective. Amaal Said’s Open Country presents a largely linear narrative grounded in the lived experiences of two Black Muslim women in contemporary Britain and is shaped by the intimacy of intergenerational family relationships. While Sam Williams’ The Eel’s Tale is more fragmentary, sharing three people’s relationship with the landscape of the North Kent Marshes, and using the mysterious life cycle of the European eel to interweave the film’s wider themes of border crossing, bodily metamorphosis, and survival for human and non-human alike. In David Blandy’s Commons we move almost entirely into the realm of the more-than-human, using objects and specimens from The Amelia Scott, in Tunbridge Wells, and The Beaney, in Canterbury, to narrate a pilgrimage across deep time through a chorus of multispecies lives. The film decentres human experience and instead gives voice to a king-fisher and a rock formation, a seed pod and a taxidermy crow, the latter of which is imagined to have witnessed Amelia Scott enroute to London in 1913 as part of a non-militant women’s suffrage pilgrimage, asking how journeys and storytelling can exist outside of linear time. 

Despite their differences, the films share a desire to cross over the boundaries of human and more-than-human, to think about the permeability of boundaries—of borders, species and identities—and invite us to think about how we inhabit the world together. Moving image becomes one mode of transcending the difficulties of individualism and enables the viewer to partake in their own journey of common empathy. Read as a collection, the films offer a variety of scales through which to approach the questions of care, responsibility and interconnectedness. From the familial and personal, to the ecological and social, to the multispecies and geological, the films ask us what it means to live together across the division of species, landscapes and time. 

In one sense, Williams’ film acts as a bridge between Open Country and Commons. The Eel’s Tale’s first narrator, wildlife conservationist Matthew Hatchwell, is shown at night with a headtorch describing his first sighting of the tiny glass eels arriving into the creek at Faversham after their 4,000 mile journey across the Atlantic from the Sargasso Sea, only to be eaten by a large adult eel before they have had chance to grow into adults themselves. This more-than-human violence, committed ‘by one of their own’, echoes across the wider film’s questions of migration, bodily autonomy and habitat conservation, poetically explored through shifting footage of the North Kent Marshes. The figure of an eel, carved as a wooden marionette, is used to thread the film’s different stories together. This artistic practice of marionette making is included on the Red List of Endangered Heritage Crafts, echoing the eel’s status as an endangered species, which has seen a 95% population decline due to habitat destruction, migration barriers, overfishing, pollution, and climate change.  

As the wooden eel floats through the reed beds so, too, does the question of who is free to move in this landscape and with what constraints. The question of migration and freedom of movement are particularly charged in the context of Faversham, which has seen the rise of anti-immigration rallies directed at the residence for unaccompanied refugee children[2]. We hear about the challenges of immigration and finding a sense of belonging from the second speaker in the film, Dre Spisto, who discovers a sense of home in the water of the estuary through wild swimming, and in their movement practice, which embodies a desire to become ‘as wild as possible’. Alongside the eel’s journey across national boundaries and man-made barriers, the film narrates the creature’s mysterious life cycle and its metamorphosis from larvae into small glass eel, from adolescent yellow eel into adult silver eel. The process of bodily transformation also resonates with Dre’s narration of their gender identity and the experience of their body changing as they age. Again, the eel serves as a symbol of nature’s fluidity: the Anguilla anguilla is born sexually undifferentiated and their sex only becomes apparent at a later stage in their life cycle. 

In a moment where migrants and trans lives are being increasingly excluded from social and political life, the eel’s global journey and bodily transformation, which the species has enacted for millions of years, offers a counternarrative to biological determinism and nationalism. In this way, The Eel’s Tale resonates with the themes of multispecies temporalities and the contemporary politics of care and dialogue in both Commons and Open Country.

Migration and freedom of movement sit at the centre of Amaal Said’s Open Country, where a daughter is recording an audio cassette of the journey for her grandmother, who lives in Somalia. The cassette represents the longing to connect across distance,  languages and generations. In contrast to the feeling voiced by the daughter late in the film that ‘there is a distance between me and everything’, the sequences that take place in The National Trust's Red House act as a utopian imaginary, where two Somali women occupy the grand house as though it were theirs, drinking tea in the dining room and tending to the garden. In one shot, the mother steps out of the house and stands on the threshold, framed between tall stems of a plant colloquially known as Bear’s Breeches (Acanthus mollis). The colouring echoes the mother’s hijab, suggesting a sense of belonging that celebrates and acknowledges the diversity of the English country garden—Acanthus species as ‘native’ to southern Europe and Northern Africa—and acknowledges a conception of England that has layered histories and multiple identities. The garden’s botanical diversity mirrors the varied journeys and inhabitants of our country, not erasing migrants, but offering space for them to take root and thrive and belong. 

The juxtaposition of the mother alongside the Bear’s Breeches reminds us that the idea of the English Cottage Garden, like the concept of a nation, is not ‘natural’ and determined, but is cultivated over time through centuries of movement, trade and cultural exchange. Open Country, then, challenges naïve notions of nativeness while unsettling the ideas of purity and origins. Read in this way, the garden becomes a space similar to that of the marshland in The Eel’s Tale or the museum collection of Commons: a place where boundaries blur and different histories, ecologies and temporalities can coexist. 

David Blandy develops the theme of belonging by extending the question of coexistence into dialogue with multispecies perspectives, vast timescales and various ecologies, the film offering multiple formal and aesthetic features of duality, pairing, and the blurring of boundaries. For example, the fox is shown from different perspectives on a split screen, at once the same and different, individual and symbolic. The taxidermy reminds us of the human violence that has led to the fox being preserved as we hear its memory of the men and their dogs it was constantly weary of as it hunted to feed its family. In another scene, Blandy uses archival film footage by Kentish naturalist Frank Perrin Barnitt of a mayfly larva under a microscope, followed by a fresh-water polyp called a Hydra vulgaris. The mayfly, we are told, lives just for a day, whereas the hydra, named after the mythical beast that could self-regenerate when wounded, is seen to be a creature that never dies. Blandy brings together the otherworldliness of the microscopic and the mythical alongside the differing scales of deep time that the archival footage has somewhat magically preserved. If deep time is the phrase used to describe the geological time that spans far beyond human existence and understanding, then the filmic version of the mayfly and the larva presents us with two objects that portray the impossibility of the past in the present, the dead as being somewhat alive, and the incomprehensibility of the world’s ecologies as momentarily accessible. Commons puts before us questions of our own mortality through the ecologies of life beyond ordinary perception and confronts us with the fleetingness of our own human life, the film inculcating ‘an uncanny and unsettling reminder of vast forces beyond one’s control.’[3] 

Through the bringing together of different types of archival materials and the use of scanning technologies to represent geological and ecological objects, Blandy blurs the contemporary with the ancient, the digital with the material, in ways which connect to William’s intertidal and species boundary crossings, and Said’s leaps across generational and geographical distances.

In all three films we are left with the question of how empathy for others’ journeys through life can be generated and are encouraged to cultivate an awareness of our own entangled existence with others of all species.  

‘The concept of landscape is so subjective and individual’, Matthew Hatchwell tells us in The Eel’s Tale, recognising his own appreciation of the Kentish marshes is likely different from those who aren’t aware of the eels’ presence, and endangered lives, in the water ways. In the same sense, each of these films responds to the idea of pilgrimage and storytelling with a unique perspective, while at the same time the films are three chapters of a larger collective. Open Country presents an exploration of belonging and migration through an intimate story of family, desire for connection and conceptions of home, inviting the viewer to empathise with those who have taken many difficult journeys in their life. The Eel’s Tale uses the fluidity of the marshland and its intertidal topography to echo the porousness of bodies, boundaries and identities, while embracing the mystery of the eel’s life cycle, inviting us to be hospitable to the unknown details of our human and non-human kin. And Commons refracts these logics across deep time to ask how we can find an ethics of co-existence in which we can learn to share land and life and resources in a sustainable future for all. 

Seen as a triptych, the films of The Open Road offer something that is not simply a retelling or adaptation of Chaucer’s pilgrimage story, but rather an alternative way of exploring what journeying means in the twenty-first century. Together the films offer a vision of fellowship through storytelling, and worlds that can be found through listening to others. 

In this sense, The Open Road exemplifies Sonia Overall’s framing of pilgrimage as a practice of attention, of recognising the moments where the boundaries between self and other begin to dissolve and we can see through to a world in which we are always-already interconnected with our human and more-than-human kin.

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Declan Wiffen is a writer, researcher and editor. He is also Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and Critical Theory at the University of Kent.

Footnotes:

[1] Sonia Overall is a writer and psychogeographer based in Kent, with a background in community arts and Higher Education. Her book Heavy Time was published by Penned in the Margins in 2021. 

[2] For reporting of the first of various protests in Faversham see: https://www.kentonline.co.uk/faversham/news/police-called-in-as-hundreds-of-protestors-and-counter-demon-329532/.  For an opinion piece written by a Faversham resident see: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/sep/09/racist-mob-menacing-refugee-children-far-right

[3] Franklin Ginn, Michelle Bastian, David Farrier, Jeremy Kidwell; Introduction: Unexpected Encounters with Deep Time. Environmental Humanities 1 May 2018; 10 (1): 213–225. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-4385534