Over a period of 16 years, ecologist Matty Hannon documented his solo travels across the Americas, embarking on admirable and enviable adventures, about which most of us can only dream.
Matty’s daring undertaking has been compiled in 'The Road To Patagonia', his directorial entry in this year’s Gold Coast Film Festival.
A desire to be a filmmaker wasn’t how it began for Matty. Spurred on by a sense of listlessness and dissatisfaction with societal expectations and cyclical activity, Matty says, “[There was a] feeling of knowing that there was a world far beyond the constraints of an urbanised system, or that kind of mindset where you felt people weren't really looking beyond the maybe narrow, mainstream, televised world. That’s what really set me off.”
“I was pretty lucky as a kid [to travel],” Matty explains of how he got the travel bug. “My whole family lived in Indonesia for a couple of years, and that was what catalysed my thinking. I got to see a whole bunch of different cultures, exposed to everything from extreme poverty to ostentatious wealth, then also the beauty of tropical rainforests, tigers and elephants and stuff, we were lucky as kids.”
Eventually completing university in Australia, at 21 years old Matty had saved money independently through various job and decided to travel for the next five years, living in a hut in the Mentawai Islands off the Indonesian coast. Then it was time to work out his next move.
Cutting a long story short, Matty returned to uni to study film. “I had picked up a camera while I was over in Sumatra [India]. It was basically so I was able to show my friends and family how amazing things are. There were no phones to be sending pictures, I would literally drop off for three months at a time, return to the mainland to send an email and no photos – the internet was very different in that time.”
After returning to his native Melbourne, Matty soon realised it wasn’t working for him; going from a subsistent lifestyle to working nine to five and surrounded by a very busy, modern city, Matty was diagnosed with depression. “I [then] bought a one-way ticket to Alaska,” Matty says, “I figured I needed something to change my life majorly. Injecting myself into one of the vast wildernesses of the planet was a good way to find the feeling I’d found in Mentawai.
“It wasn’t a 16-year journey, but it was 16 years from the footage that I had in Sumatra until the end of Patagonia. The journey itself was two and a half years, from the top of Alaska down to Patagonia.”
It was a very personal journey to Matty, who saw and discovered things far outside the bubble. In seeing his documented journeys and some out-of-this-world places, Matty tries his best to articulate the nuanced descriptions of what he hopes audiences will take from seeing 'The Road To Patagonia' at Gold Coast Film Festival: “The main take away is that there are different ways of living and interacting with the world than what our current mindset as a globalised modern society allows for,” he says. “We’re being habituated through systems we’ve been born into, that have been passed down to us and evolving, that are essentially killing us. They’re killing the planet.
“We’ve got some of the highest rates of depression in the world in these modern societies that are supposedly the most successful societies. But we’re also the societies that are the most unsustainable, the most mentally ill – and I’m not trying to bastardise the modern west, there are some amazing things to be spoken for the new technologies, but nothing’s black and white.
“The main thing I’m trying to highlight in the film is that we have a very condescending view of other cultures, especially those we deem as primitive, nature-based cultures that are seen as archaic remnants. But, in a lot of ways, they’re far healthier, far happier.”
Matty Hannon's film 'The Road To Patagonia' screens as part of Gold Coast Film Festival 28 and 30 April.
