A Pilgrimage Of Dreams is a feature documentary shot on São Miguel in the Azores, made under the guidance of Werner Herzog and co-directed with Argentine filmmaker Lila Izquierdo. Currently on the festival circuit, the film explores belonging, sacrifice, and the strange pull certain places hold over the people who find themselves unable to leave them.
Lila and I were drawn to São Miguel before we fully understood why. There was something in the island that felt familiar yet impossible to name — a pull that seemed to operate below the level of reason. We weren't alone in that feeling. When we began meeting the people who lived there, we discovered it again and again: people who had arrived, often by chance, and simply couldn't leave. Not because they had no choice, but because something in the island had spoken to them. Something had convinced them to stay, even at a cost.
The question was how an island speaks. Our answer came at night. Both of us experienced unusually vivid, searching dreams on São Miguel — the kind that seem to carry weight in the morning. It struck us that this might be the island's language. That while its residents sleep, something in that volcanic earth finds its way in.
That became our starting point. We worked with our contributors not to document their lives, but to explore what the island had been telling them — through sleep, through feeling, through the strange logic of the unconscious. What emerged were intimate testimonies about belonging, sacrifice, and the mysterious power of place to shape a life.
A Pilgrimage of Dreams is an attempt to listen to those messages, and to ask what it means to be chosen by somewhere — and to choose it back.
— Lila Izquierdo & Thomas Hogben