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Confessions Of A Pilgrim
Sue returns to the
celebrated ancient
Spanish pilgrimage path
to walk 500 kilometers
alone on the
Feature Film - My Camino
In development. A treatment, outline, sample scenes and first draft of a script have been written by Sue Kenney and Bruce Pirrie. Presently securing funding for production.My Camino
"My name is Sue Kenney, and I am a pilgrim…."
It is with these words that Sue Kenney begins her story, the true story of an ordinary woman who chose to accomplish extraordinary things. Sue's voice-over narration will be succinct and strategic, specific to the spiritual theme. Told from the point of view of a woman who has already completed the journey we are watching unfold, the voice-over will enrich what we are seeing with hindsight, subtext, irony, humour, and provide additional context.
Down-sized from a major corporation, when Sue walks across the Pyrenees from France and into Spain, she also enters a foreign film. A Bernardo Bertolucci -type film about a world where the familiar is strange and the strange is familiar. Gorgeous, lush Galician landscapes, foreboding deserts, and enveloping sunsets imbue this story of a spiritual journey with a natural travelogue and visual empathy.
Due to the often-meditative nature of walking 30 kilometers a day, self-reflection is inevitable. Sue's mind is thus free to roam to any point in her life. As various situations along the Camino occur we discover more about what has brought her to this point in her life. We discover that prior to being down-sized, Sue had won a Gold Medal in Masters Class Rowing, a sport she had only just taken up at the age of forty. We watch the preparations she has to make in mind, body, and spirit to achieve her goal. We are there in the race when she and her team win the gold in Boston. These lessons learned in rowing ("It combined brute strength with balletic grace") come in handy on the Camino to the degree that Sue can literally see her rowing crew walking in lock-step with her along the path, giving her strength in the paranoia-inducing, Meseta.
We later learn about her marriage break-up and about her relationships with her three daughters. We see her own childhood as the second of seven children in a Catholic family, an upbringing, that she discovers on the Camino, had more of an affect on her than she thought. The familiar rituals, the settings the iconography, the music all come back to her, resonating with memory and religion, all adding to the spiritual quotient of the theme and visuals.
Everyone who has ever embarked on the Camino has done so with some degree of spirituality in mind, therefore the discussions among the pilgrims from all over the world around the rough-hewn tables in the millennia old Refugio's are often peppered with insightful statements and discoveries about human nature, history, philosophy, and folklore leading to spirited, moving and humourous exchanges among a fascinating cast of characters.
Equally as important as any of the others (if not more so) the love story is the element that not only parallels and illuminates the spiritual or internal aspects of Sue's journey, it feeds it and is fed by it. Sue's discovery that she must love herself before she can love someone else is made manifest in the trajectory of her relationship with Andreas, the German pilgrim with whom she has a deep and moving love affair. From his off-hand remark about symbolically placing sorrow in stones to a climactic merging of their souls on a windswept mountain, Andreas personifies and profoundly affects Sue's spiritual growth.
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