Reflective Encounters

Island House, the filmmaker’s new home in the centre of Plymouth, UK, becomes a starting point for an exploration of the history of settler colonialism related to the ‘Mayflower’, the ship that carried English settlers, known as Pilgrims, to America in 1620.

Come on Pilgrim is a layered essay film where fragments of history are read by a community of im/migrants, contrasting with the narratives presented by memorials and plaques displayed around the city. Early on, the viewer is introduced to a landscape of buildings and sea-views inhabited by characters who delve into stories about Britain. Plymouth’s involvement in the slave trade is exposed, while anti-war protests and climate justice demonstrations are documented on the city’s streets. It soon becomes clear that the film is a community effort in search of truth, carried out by disrupting narratives as a group of people is seen engaging in an absurd act of scratching a vinyl record. Artists and activists reciting the investigative script, seashore landscapes, playful medieval reenactment, and elements of the city’s architecture are presented to the viewer fragmentarily, just like the mysterious archaeological objects in the film are held out to the camera by gloved hands.

The land, the cityscape, the voices and faces surfacing throughout Come on Pilgrim create a collage appearing as the most appropriate way of documenting the acts of searching for answers in the complex spaces of myth and history, deception and reality, using acts of performance to discuss performativity and challenge historically inaccurate facts.

— Patrycja Loranc