| The Women Who Walk |
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| Written by Anya Wassenberg | |||||||
Sue Kenney's 2006 documentary Las Peregrinas - The Women Who Walk tells the story of a pilgrimage along a midieval trail and the women who take it. You could say that Sue Kenney got into making films by accident. "Actually," she says, "never at any time in my life did I ever think I would be a filmmaker." Like so many films, Kenney's 2006 documentary Las Peregrinas - The Women Who Walk begins with a story, and there are many other people like Sue, of course, who end up in a career far from where they start their working lives. But, the adventure that led her from telecom account exec to filmmaker/author/screenwriter itself contains a journey-a journey of 780 kilometers. Back when that telecom career ended, Sue found herself feeling unsure of her direction. Having heard of the legendary pilgrimage of El Camino de Santiago de Compostela, a medieval trail that meanders through the Pyrenée mountains of France into Spain, Sue decided that the free time she now had could be put to good use walking the roughly 40 day route. It proved to be an experience that would change her life in many more ways than one.  "When I was on the Camino, I walked 20 to 22 kilometers a day, 780 kilometers in all. I spent a lot of time by myself in an effort to try and figure out what my purpose was. People have been walking for over 1100 years on the same path-it's like you're being removed from the rest of the world. At the same time, I'm meeting people in a unique situation, you have these very deep conversations...when I was a child, all my report cards said Susan is too talkative, so as an adult, I've tried to manage and suppress my voice. A woman asked me what I would do once I left Camino.. she said I should use my voice, and tell my story." On her return home, Sue took that message to heart and began to tell friends about her experiences on the Camino. "I wanted to share the simplicity of that life, with no commercial trappings, the sense of perspective. The more I told stories, the more they wanted to hear." Encouraged by friends and family to write a book, Sue decided first to record her stories in CD form, and managed to sell 1,000 copies in six months from a small gift store in Ontario's cottage country. After the audio CD, she found a book publisher interested in the story of her pilgrimage, and Sue Kenney's My Camino (White Knight Publications, May 1, 2004) is the result-and another first time experience. "He wanted a manuscript in two months," Kenney recalls, "so I produced a 54,000 word manuscript in two months-we edited afterwards!" People who'd read My Camino approached her with ideas that led to another string of projects, including inspirational speaking engagements and a one-woman stage show at London Ontario's Fringe Festival. Sue felt humbled by the idea of using her voice to inspire others. It's a humility that translates into her writing and speaking engagement and seems to connect with her audiences. A film seemed the next logical step and one that was suggested to her by many different people in various forms before she settled on a firm vision of her own. "I wanted to (convey) the experience of the Camino," she says, noting that she turned down the first production company that approached her. "It wasn't a good fit," she remarks. Around the same time, she was approached by a woman who wanted Sue to take her and three friends on the pilgrimage. The woman was dying of cancer and wanted a memorable last trip. Sue was instantly captivated by the idea. "I wanted to tell their story," she says. With a stubborn vision of her film in mind, other production companies and directors approached and were discarded, the last director just five weeks before she was to leave on the trip. "At that time, I didn't know what a DOP was...now I had to go out and hire one!" She found her Director of Photography, Pasha Patriki, by another act of happenstance. "I trusted in the spirit of the Camino, and sure enough, I ran into someone while having coffee who suggested Pasha. I explained he'd basically have to live with his camera, and he was immediately captured by the idea of being a pilgrim." More than anything, Kenney wanted the documentary to capture the multi dimensional experience of being on the Camino. Along with the images, Las Peregrinas-the Women Who Walk uses an atmospheric soundtrack of music, chanting voices, song and other incidental sounds to add to the effect. "As a first time director, I trusted that if I told the stories as best I could, I was fulfilling my purpose-as funny as that sounds." The resulting film is infused with a reverence for the mountainous landscape and a sense of that beautiful and natural simplicity, where even the structures built by human hands blend into a peaceful environment. There is indeed a distinct feeling of being removed from the rest of the world, of traveling though a rarefied atmosphere. Skies are big and open, the hills dotted with green, sometimes with vineyards, and the people on the way are open and friendly. Seeing the film, it's not hard to imagine that the Camino experience would peel away at the veneer imprinted by complex modern society and have life changing spiritual dimensions. Once shot, getting the film completed, released, and shown in public proved to be another winding road. "I've decided I'm not able to decide who should or shouldn't see the film-there are other people much better suited for that," Kenny admits. She remembers shopping the film to broadcasters-35 hours of unedited footage-whose typical response was "How do you show a spiritual journey?" she says. "I was told it wasn't multicultural enough-these women were Polish, Italian, Lebanese, Irish." she notes with a rueful laugh. Studio execs seemed to want some kind of pop culture spin, or to fit it into a trendy mould. "It wasn't a social issue we were dealing with!" she exclaims in retrospect. Turned down by the mainstream route, Sue's belief in her film and its message-one she found was most relevant to female audiences-became her driving force. "If I believe there are people who want to see the film, how do I find them?" All her previous ventures now began to come into play as she began mining her mailing lists. "I went to [the people on my mailing lists], and asked, could they hold a gathering, ask the [people attending] to make a donation, and offer it to a cause or product that's important to them." After the screening, Sue wanted people to hold a forum for talking afterwards, not only about the film, but its broader message of the Camino journey as a metaphor for life. "I came out of a marketing background, in telecommunications, but I didn't want to use typical marketing techniques. I wanted to present it and let people find it." Film as something you'd discover of your own volition is non-traditional "marketing" scheme to be sure." All along the Camino trail, there are volunteers and pay as you can hostels. I'm offering the film in the same spirit." The weekend after its first public screening at Toronto's National Film Board theatre on October 30, Las Peregrinas was shown to 2,000+ people in over 40 locations from five continents, including Hong Kong, Japan, Brazil, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, and all over North America and Europe. Gatherings ranged from small private screenings to publicly advertised events, with a whole gamut of charities benefiting from the launch. In Toronto, a single screening was attended by nearly 300, and in London, Ontario, a total of 600 people saw the film. Another set of event screenings were held for Women's Day in March 2007, with similar results.  As for Kenney herself, the adventure seems set to continue, and people continue to approach her with ideas and possibilities. After the release of the book My Camino, her grown daughters left home, and Sue, yearning for the simplicity she'd felt, left busy Toronto to move to cottage country in a small lakeside community in Northern Ontario. But before long, even a quieter pace off the beaten track wasn't quite enough, and she began to feel the pull of the Camino again. Many pilgrims, in fact, once they'd reached the end, were known to simply turn around and keep going back the other way. After giving it some thought, Sue decided to emulate that experience and cover the opposite direction of the ancient path, following a route along the Galician coast from Portugal into Spain. Just weeks before she was scheduled to leave, Sue received an e-mail from a friend, an Aboriginal woman who insisted on seeing her before the trip. When they met, the woman told Sue she'd been instructed in a dream to give her an eagle feather, an honour she was to pass along to someone else on the pilgrimage. The woman went so far as to explain a number of criteria for choosing that person. Flattered, but unsure of how she felt about this added element to what was to be a personal journey, Sue left for Europe; but it was only the first in a string of unforeseen circumstances and "added elements" to the trip. Mugged in Frankfurt, and after the airline lost her backpack, the eagle feather she'd tucked into her belt and the clothes on her back were virtually all she had left by the time she actually starting walking the almost 500km route through the mountains. But the Camino's magic was stronger than her material troubles as she fell once again under the spell of the land and the people she met-the eagle feather and her reluctant spiritual quest becoming a thread that led her from start to finishing point in negotiating the trail on her own. With an unexpected ending to the eagle feather quest, Sue's adventures took a different turn, through to a reunion-and developing romance-with a German backpacker she'd met on the first pilgrimage. The whole story of that second surprising pilgrimage became Sue's second book, Confessions of a Pilgrim, (White Knight Books) released in May 2007. Back in Canada and with the offbeat success of Las Peregrinas, Sue made contacts in the indie film world, teamed up with award winning writer Bruce Pirrie, and began developing scripts. After months of negotiating and working together, in spring 2007, Sue signed a deal with Montreal production company Cirrus Communications (whose sensational C.R.A.Z.Y. was selected as Canada's official submission for the 2005 Academy Award(r) for Best Foreign Language Film,) for a screenplay adaptation of My Camino. She intends on working with Pirrie again on that project. To some, the end of a stable career becomes the beginning of a downward spiral. Kenney's story is proof that every ending is indeed a beginning. Comments (0)
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