Documentary · 2022
Every year, hundreds of thousands of people walk to Altötting. They come from across Bavaria, from Austria, from places further still. Some have made the journey many times. Others arrive on foot for the first time, completing a pilgrimage that began years earlier in the imagination and only now, for reasons they may not fully understand, has been made physical. The Long Way Round, directed by Andreas Hykade, is a documentary animation about this movement and about everything that people carry with them when they walk toward something they cannot see.
Hykade, whose previous work had largely occupied the territory of personal, almost mythological short film, came to this project after a conversation with a woman he met at a bus stop near Munich. She had just completed the pilgrimage on foot four days of walking and was waiting for a bus that would take her the rest of the way home. She had blisters that she showed him without embarrassment. When he asked her why she did it, she thought for a long time before saying: "I don't know. But I know it was necessary."
That phrase became the film's animating question. Not: what do pilgrims believe? Not: what does the shrine at Altötting represent theologically or historically? But: what is the quality of necessity that makes a person walk for days when they could take a train? What is being worked out in the body that cannot be worked out any other way?
The film interviews twenty-three pilgrims over the course of two years. Their testimonies are animated rather than filmed a decision that Hykade made early and defended throughout production. Photography, he argued, would have located these people too specifically, would have made them individuals rather than something more representative. Animation allowed their stories to remain theirs while also becoming universal. The visual style, drawn from medieval woodcut illustration and filtered through a deliberately rough digital process, gave the testimonies a quality of ancient repetition as if these same stories had been told in the same words by different mouths for centuries.
The film does not take a position on faith. Several of the pilgrims interviewed are not religious in any conventional sense. They walk because they have always walked. They walk because their parents walked. They walk because something about the physical act of long-distance movement produces a state of mind that they have not found anywhere else. One pilgrim, a software developer in his thirties, described the pilgrimage as "the only time in the year when my thoughts have enough space to finish." The animation that accompanies his words shows a figure walking through a landscape that slowly empties of everything except sky.
Post-production on The Long Way Round took almost as long as the research and shooting phases combined. The sound design was particularly complex: the film's score, composed for a small ensemble of strings and field recordings gathered along the pilgrimage routes, had to carry the emotional weight of transitions between testimonies that often sat in stark tonal contrast to one another. The final cut, running 52 minutes, was described by the director as "the shortest version that honoured everyone who spoke."
The film premiered at a documentary festival in 2022 and subsequently aired on a regional broadcaster, where it attracted an audience significantly larger than anticipated. The studio received letters for months afterward from viewers who had found something in it they had not expected to find not a story about religion, but a story about patience, about the human need to earn arrival rather than simply achieve it.
Director: Andreas Hykade
Production: Cheese Sama, 2022