"The Way" - Martin Sheen + son's Santiago de Compostella film

The Telegraph website is in early with a review and plot summary article about a film I've been looking forward to for some time: "The Way". Here's their "logline" of the plot:

"Martin Sheen plays an American doctor who decides to walk the the 500-mile Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route after his son is killed there. The film is directed by Sheen's son Emilio Estevez."

St. James' statue at the "Glory Door" entrance to Santiago Cathedral.

Having been to Santiago de Compostella 3 times as a pilgrim (twice cycling - from Brittany + from Liverpool - and once hiking) it is a place and a journey that is very close to my heart and to the hearts of fellow Camino pilgrims in my congregation.

The film is being released in the UK on May 13th. Click here for an article page that includes the film's trailer.

Here's the start of another Telegraph article by columnist and author Christopher Howse that is certainly encouraging and gets my hopes up that we've got something special here:

"Normally I run like a startled springbok from tales of the road to Santiago. Duller than holiday snaps, they possess a peculiar self-centredness, as if no one else had ever walked to the pilgrim destination in north-west Spain.

So it was with some relief that I found myself both interested and moved half way through The Way, a film starring Martin Sheen directed by his son Emilio Estevez. Partly it was the landscape. It's a pretty film because the autumn hills and fields of northern Spain, with low sun over ploughed earth and bleached grass, suit projection on a big screen.

But, an hour in, the audience had got over an enormous obstacle. The obstacle is that people who see themselves self-consciously as pilgrims on the Camino to Santiago de Compostela can be very annoying. The characters in this film are no exception.

James Nesbitt, superlative as an annoying screen presence, joins a scratchy Canadian woman and a rebarbatively bonhomous Dutchman in tagging after Martin Sheen like the Tin Man, Scarecrow and Lion with Judy Garland – a parallel I later found was not new to the director..."

Go here for the rest of Howse's article.