JUNE 8 2019 LISTENER 49
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“I was fascinated with her
determination to try and finish the
achievement, to try and knock it off,” he
tells the Listener from the Cannes Film
Festival. He thought accompanying Morris
and other Antipodean
trampers facing their own
challenges might make a
film that would appeal to
Australasian audiences.
So, he and Smyth put out
the call via travel agents: if
you’re walking the Camino
de Santiago this year, join us
so we can tell your story.
They auditioned 30
possibles by Skype. Among
the four New Zealanders
cast was Christchurch
psychologist Julie Zarifeh,
who lost husband Paul to
pancreatic cancer and adult
son Sam in a river-rafting
accident 16 days later, in late
2017.
Grady met Zarifeh after
her husband’s funeral. When
she told him about Sam
some weeks later, Grady
suggested she bow out of the
project.
“My immediate reaction was, ‘Don’t
come, don’t be involved in the film, take
some time out.’ But she was adamant that
this is exactly what she wanted to do. She
wanted to get onto the Camino as fast as
possible.”
With her emotions never far from the
surface, but exuding a quiet strength and
humour throughout, Zarifeh becomes
a star of the film. Among the others are
Terry Wilson, who is walking the Camino
for a second time, on this occasion
taking his son-in-law, Mark
Thomson. Both blokes
are doing it in memory
of granddaughter and
daughter Maddy, who had
died 18 months earlier,
aged 17, of cystic fibrosis.
Their walk raised money for
organisations dealing with
the condition, but Thomson
also saw it as a chance to
ensure that he would live
to see his younger children
grow up – when he started
training for the walk, he
weighed 150kg.
The Manawatu pair were
the fastest walkers, says
Grady, and the funniest. On
arriving at the end, Wilson
takes in the splendour of
the Cathedral of Santiago de
Compostela before turning
to Thomson: “Are you going
to buy me a beer or am I
going to buy you one?”
“They brought a bit of comedy relief,”
says Grady, “which we obviously needed,
otherwise it would have been all doom
and gloom.”
They may not have been the first film
crew on the trail, but having embedded
themselves with the hikers, they think
they might have set the record for distance
actually walked by any productions.
Smyth, acting as cinematographer, was
carrying an 18kg backpack as well as 6kg
of camera equipment. Grady’s sound gear
and a drone added to his load. “So, there
was some serious tramping,” says Grady.
The movie was shot on the hoof, and it
wasn’t until they got into an editing suite
that knew they actually had a film. Grady
says he had a plan B, though. “I was
adamant that if the main film was bad, we
were going to make a documentary called
‘Drones on the Camino’.”
That aerial camera captures an eye-
of-God perspective on the Camino de
Santiago (the Way of St James), which
ends at the cathedral and tomb of St
James.
Grady says he was too busy trying
to capture the participants’ emotional,
spiritual and physical journeys to
experience any epiphanies himself. Still,
the resulting film may answer a few
prayers for the first-time feature makers. l
Camino Skies screens at the Doc Edge
Festival in Auckland on June 6 and 7, and in
Wellington on June 17,18 and 21, with charity
screenings for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation
in Pahiatua on July 4, and for the Muslim
Widows Foundation at the Isaac Royal Theatre,
Christchurch on July 5. It opens nationwide at
cinemas on July 11.
Emotional, spiritual and physical journey: the
Camino de Santiago, left, and the Cathedral of
Santiago de Compostela.
Fergus Grady
Julie Zarifeh