"Go, go, go… Go somewhere. Go somewhere else." Following this personal mantra, a nomadic artist named Jimmy, who has been on his own since the age of four, packs up and leaves Montreal for Barcelona, soon venturing on to Kobe, Japan. Wandering is a way of life and a vehicle for creative inspiration for Jimmy and four other roaming artists documented in director Tamás Wormser's new production, Travelling Light: Artists on the Move.
The documentary follows five itinerant artists as they wander across three continents seeking to discover life and reinvent themselves in the process. The transience and constant flux of a nomadic existence acts as an impetus for creative expression, allowing the artists to transcend the borders of physical space and access the boundless realms of the creative imagination. Wormser spent five years following these artists through 11 countries on their individual quests to live and create. By probing the lives of individuals who hold living as the highest art form, Wormser's captivating film both blurs the distinction between art and life and examines the interplay of escape and attachment.
From a Brazilian brothel to a traditional Japanese village to the streets of New York City, the film moves seamlessly though space and time, creating the sense of an increasingly postmodern society where the global becomes the local as time zones, oceans and continents are crossed in the blink of an eye.
We follow Quebec native Nathalie as she voyages through Southeast Asia, Australia, Europe and South America taking photographs for her "evasion"-themed collection which features images of hotels, brothels, femininity and sexuality. The goal of her work is to "show things that people can't see." Swiss-Bulgarian artist Christina voyages from the Rhine to the shores of the St. Lawrence River creating her mixed media "body-extension" art and sharing her personal philosophy that relationships are the most meaningful form of art.
The audience is then invited to a French street festival where Lundo, a musician travelling with his wife and two young children Tao and Zia, performs with his band, La Chango Family. For Lundo, music is a way of connecting to people's souls and living in the moment. His original song, "Happily Desperate and Desperately Happy," captures the excitement and uncertainty of life as a travelling musician.
Although all of these nomads live on the fringes of society, the most hermetic of them is Laszlo, a Hungarian painter who inhabits a makeshift shelter of branches and garbage bags in a Quebec forest during the -40 degree winter. For Laszlo, art is a spiritual quest into the limitlessness of the creative mind. Gazing at the condensation of his breath collecting on the plastic garbage-bag walls of his tent, he reflects that living primitively, like ancient peoples, stimulates creativity. For him, as with the others, his physical location is less critical than his mental state. Where he lives is "nowhere….just somewhere on this planet."
The film offers many profound messages, but ultimately begs the question, can we ever truly "travel light"? Even these artists, for whom roaming the world is a means of fulfilling their insatiable urge to experience all that life has to offer, find that freedom is a double-edged sword. To be a free spirit is also to be a prisoner of freedom. The attachments of home and family provide security in a complex world, and to forgo these comforts for a life of wandering and solitude is to travel a path littered with trials and difficulties.
Though the artists have achieved varying degrees of commercial success, they seem to triumph in the true objective of nomadic life-being here now, and heightening one's consciousness so as to live entirely in the present moment. This noble striving, the film argues, is an art in itself.
Travelling Light
runs from April 4 - 10 at Cinema du Parc (3575 du Parc). Check www.cinemaduparc.com for tickets and showtimes.
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