OUT OF EDEN WALK

I have walked for 15 months.

Every 100 miles along my route, I pause to record a Milestone. The procedure is standardized. I shoot a panoramic photo of the surface of the Earth. I take snapshots of my feet and the sky. I record a snippet of ambient sound. I pose a set of questions about identity and migration to the nearest human being. With our partners at Translatedesk, we also have begun translating, in a new feature called the Twitter Spotlight, snapshots of social media traffic pegged to each of these points. (More about this soon.) Eventually, hundreds of Milestones will be strung out, like sensory beads, along the pathways of our first discovery of the Earth.

One feature of these stops are Glances, short videos produced by Patrick Wellever at the Knight Science Journalism Fellowship Program at MIT. Patrick condenses footage I shoot on site into one-minute visual haikus.

In the same cinematic spirit, then, we at the Out of Eden Walk have compiled a list of our favorite films — features, documentaries, animations, shorts — that highlight the subjects of walking, movement, migration, questing. My five entries:

EKKI MÚKK (2012) directed by Nicholas Abrahams.

A music video about journeying that crosses Beatrix Potter with Euripides. It features a talking snail (voiced by the folkie Shirley Collins) and is set to the music of Sigur Rós, an Icelandic band that sings in a made-up language. Nick is seeking funding to produce a full-length feature version of this video. Bonus: An animated short made by another artist for the same song, featuring an aerial tramp steamer, could pass as an MTV take on slow journalism.

WALKABOUT (1971) directed by Nicolas Roeg.

Surreal. Gorgeous. Unsentimental. With probably the most arresting opening sequence in cinema. Superficially, a tale about survival in the Australian desert. But beneath that blistering surface, a chilly poem of spiritual isolation.

USONI (in production) directed by Cherie Lindiwe.

A trailer only. The world still awaits the first pilot of this Kenyan sci-fi series about a natural cataclysm that reverses the flow of destitute migrants — from a dying Europe to a robust Africa in 2062. Produced by students at the United States International University in Nairobi.

THE ANIMATED DRAWINGS OF WILLIAM KENTRIDGE (1989-present)

William Kentridge is South African. While his oeuvre doesn’t particularly concern journeys, it contains many images of people on the move. His enigmatic films — charcoal drawings sketched, photographed, erased, and drawn again — allude to memory, exile and the unspoken history steeped into landscapes. These are walking themes.

THE IMMIGRANT (1917) directed by Charlie Chaplin.

A classic slapstick treatment of the uneasy camaraderie among the world’s uprooted. Almost a century after it was made, the skating soup bowls still amaze.

Out of Eden Walk social media editor Camille Bromley is our movie fan. “Film is the most expressive media, I think, for capturing voyages — displacement over space and time both exterior and interior,” she says. For gripping journeys — literal and metaphysical — Camille recommends:

PILGRIMAGE (2001) directed by Werner Herzog.

A documentary short about movement and devotion, focusing on the tomb of Saint Sergei in Sergiyev Posad in Russia and the Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico. Herzog, an avid walker, once trekked from Munich to Paris hoping that this pilgrimage would heal a dying friend.

CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS (2010) another Herzog film.

A 3-D exploration of the dazzling Stone Age art discovered in Chauvet Cave, France. A European archeologist dresses up as an Inuit and plays The Star Spangled Banner on a “very tiny flute made from the radius of a vulture.” From The New Yorker capsule review: “The whole thing ends with a pool full of baby albino crocodiles. Of course it does.”

TIM ROBINSON: CONNEMARA (2011) directed by Pat Collins.

A lyric tribute to a writer and mapmaker who documents the austere beauty of western Ireland. Ambient sound from the region is the co-star.

GREEN TUNNEL (2009) directed by Kevin Gallagher.

“A beautiful stop-motion film of a hiker’s journey over the Appalachian Trail.”

NAQOYQATSI (2002) directed by Godfrey Reggio.

The last in a famous trilogy of art films that cast a steady-cam’s gaze on the impact of post-industrial society on nature and people.

INTO THE WILD (2007) directed by Sean Penn.

Based on a real incident, the story of the rootless life and untimely death of a young wanderer in the American West. It brings to mind Loren Eiseley’s forlorn judgment of the American mythos of Frontier: “Americans made a mistake they have been paying for ever since. In response to the Homestead Act they have been strung out at nighttime into a vast solitude.”

THE LONGEST WAY (2008) directed by Christopher Rehage.

“One man’s one-year walking trek through China, recorded via time-lapse video of his beard growth. A little silly, but visually interesting.”

Julia Payne, the walk’s Project Manager, pulls two travel documentaries from her rucksack, both homages to our tireless, lonely journeys towards each other. (One even helps polish your rusty French.)

PARIS JE T’AIME (2006) directed by various filmmakers.

In this anthology of shorts, Alexander Payne’s vignette about a middle-aged woman’s first trip to the City of Light shimmers, in Julia’s words, as “a brilliant expression of why people travel.”

CRAIGSLIST JOE (2012) directed by Joseph Garner.

Man travels without money across America. Man survives only off connections made on Craigslist. A depiction of hunting and gathering in the digital age.

Helen Shariatmadari, a walk advisor and documentary producer at the BBC, takes Herzog out for yet another stroll:

ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD (2007) directed by Herzog.

Soundtrack with Russian liturgical music? Check. People roped together, walking across snow with steel buckets covering their heads? Check. We watch Herzog the way we read Bruce Chatwin — for a tour of his brain as much as the country ahead. Herzog’s Antarctica features suicidal penguins and the world’s most desolate ATM.

OUT OF AFRICA (1985) directed by Sydney Pollack.

“How could I forget — Out of Africa, although I’m sure it goes against your taste, it’s about one woman’s quest to tame a continent and the continent inside her… go Meryl!”

Shariatmadari also recommends two other haunted travelogues by Herzog, the documentary Grizzly Man and the feature Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Harder to come by is her choice of BBC films about the liquid journeys of Roger Deakin, a British writer and environmentalist who “wandered all over England swimming in wild rivers and lakes, connecting with England’s ancient woodland culture.”

Send us your own movie waypoints from across the globe in the comments section below.