Our generation has to seek out its own adventures. We have to imagine them based on our own unique internalization of literature, popular culture, history books, and family legends - a mosaic of imprints which, at one time, provided the basis of our imaginary play as children and later on, shaped our adventure seeking as young adults. “When We Were Pirates” expresses that search for adventure as eloquently as our own souls can imagine it.
The adventure that producers Daniel Casanova and Mario Gonzalez imagine and attempt to realize is a journey to Bangladesh where they will build a boat and sail it to Australia. But the premise of that goal only provides the background to a much richer story of youthful lust for self- and world discovery and accomplishment, as well as a portrait of human interaction between the two American young men, their Norwegian friends, and the Bangalese locals with whom they awkwardly attempt communication and work on their boat.
As their project progresses, their efforts and experiences and emotions resonate into one powerful expression - The Traveler: The notion or embodiment of a deliberately lost soul - naïve and eager - creative and resolute. He is both enchanted and devastated by the world around him. Profoundly fulfilled while still somehow deeply frustrated.
Illuminated by a pensive soundtrack, these sensibilities haunt the subjects as well as the audience - As Dylan, for example, sings of his own “Hard Road,” and the travelers unravel their own beatnik glories, I found myself doing the same.
And of course, at times, their undertaking reeks of western privilege - the travelers’ “adventure” is placed up against the backdrop of real third world living. The fisherman work while the travelers iron out details of their adventure, but instead of being an unintentional revelation, that juxtaposition is developed as a central theme of the film: reality interacting with and against fantasy.
Because ultimately, their fantasy unravels into reality: they face real fear, real emptiness, and real reliance on each other by the end of their adventure. The film and its makers, despite retaining absolute faith in their grandiose ideas, remain committed to the traveler’s duality in its ultimate implication: that perhaps the real adventure was the journey itself: negotiating the cross-cultural interaction; facing the inhumanity of border distinctions; immersing themselves in a distant way of life; and finally, realizing that their real goal was to experience all of this, rather than to succeed at their mission.
-Alexis Martin
