Get with the pilgrim

Australian film-maker Bill Bennett thought turning his Camino de Santiago experience into a movie would be a good walk ruined. But he did it anyway.

- RUSSELL BAILLIE

A fter walking the Camino de Santiago in 2013, Aussie Bill Bennett wrote a book about the experience, The Way, My Way: A Camino Memoir. A film distributor got in touch saying there could be a movie in it. After all, Camino flicks had become their own arthouse genre.

Bennett didn't think so. He wasn't being humble - he had written and directed a dozen-plus features in Oz and further afield. The book, in which he pondered the experience of having walked the historic trail through northern Spain and how it changed him personally, was enough.

"I got to Santiago at the end of 800km and the essential question that I had was unanswered, and that question was: 'Why am I doing this?" he tells the Listener via Zoom. "I thought that I would write the book to help me find that answer. But if I thought there was a movie in a book, I would have done it by now."