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How Cinema-Inspired Travel Is Creating a New Wave of Pilgrimage Tourism
Reel locations become real landmarks for cinephiles chasing celluloid memories across continents, timelines and life stages.
Actor Tom Hanks once famously said: “[Cinema] has the power to not make you feel lonely, even when you are.” The statement reveals the true spirit of the craft — both transcendental and immersive in nature — that sometimes even transports a viewer into a world or a moment physically inaccessible to them. And then there are individuals whose lives reside at the very intersection of cinema and travel, with one often leading to the other, inspiring stories that are mostly personal, but often universal too.
London-based creator Thomas Duke’s Instagram account @steppingthroughfilm, started in 2017, has garnered a community of over 760,000 followers through the years. His page is entirely dedicated to his travels across the world inspired by scenes from films and shows. What sets it apart, though, is how Duke takes a printed photograph of a specific scene and holds it up against the real-world location where it was shot. It’s how Duke comes closest to stepping into a world he’s seen on celluloid, which also vicariously allows his online followers to get a sense of how much or how little the space has transformed since it was captured on film.
“It is a unique way of travelling that inspired me to try something similar too,” says Dhriti Singh, a 25-year-old techie based in Delhi, who recently took a trip to London inspired by Duke’s posts as an homage to the popular TV show Friends, on the occasion of actor Matthew Perry’s (who played Chandler Bing) passing in October 2023.
It was the first time she took a trip abroad, that too solo. “It was nerve-wracking, but it gave me a sense of purpose since I’d grown up watching the show. Especially after Matthew Perry’s death, the trip felt like a personal pilgrimage of sorts,” Singh says. It kept her from feeling lonely even — like having a friend on a mission keep her company in moments that could’ve otherwise felt overwhelming in solitude. “The thing about travelling when inspired by cinema is that it allows you to also map your growth as a person — from the time you first watched what inspired this trip to when you finally make that trip — it’s a trajectory you can chart that reveals so much about how you’ve evolved as a person.”
Singh first made her way to Westminster Abbey, the spot where Chandler gets huffy as Joey photographs him, in season four. She teared up when she remembered Perry’s death in that moment, staring at the monument’s façade. “You realise how much of who you are today has been shaped by these fictional characters who have lived with you for years — so much so that they’ve influenced you to do better, travel the world and even find a kind of confidence that may have otherwise evaded you,” she says. After all, she adds, “There aren’t as many wonderful ways of learning about the world as there is by travelling.” Singh, in fact, explored the city without an itinerary once she was done visiting the Friends locations, and her discoveries of nooks and corners not featured on popular listicles took her by surprise.
Cinema-Inspired Tourism
Back home, however, cinema is known to have triggered wanderlust among Indians who are always on the look out for the next “Instagrammable” place to visit. This trend, though, dates to the ’80s, when director-producer Yash Chopra shot his chiffon-sari-clad heroines romancing their heroes against lush Swiss backdrops, with the most memorable one being Chandni (1989) starring Sridevi and Rishi Kapoor. It propelled Indian tourism in the Alpine nation to such an extent that in 2016, the Swiss government honoured him with a 350-kilogram bronze statue in the heart of Interlaken.
In 2001, Farhan Akhtar’s directorial debut Dil Chahta Hai — starring Aamir Khan, Saif Ali Khan and Akshaye Khanna — not only rewrote the rules of storytelling in Hindi cinema, but revolutionised tourism in Goa as well. Shot largely in the coastal state, the film triggered a spate of buddy and road movies where the locations became central to the story’s plot — a bona fide character unto itself. The movie, in fact, serves as a case study for how public-private partnerships, when done right, can benefit several aspects of the economy.
In 2010, at a travel convention, the then chairperson of the Goa Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Ralph de Sousa — who now serves as the vice chairman of the Goa Tourism Board — spoke about how promoting Goa alongside the movie boosted tourism after the industry hit a post-9/11 slump. He revealed that ₹3 crore was invested in the campaign during the film’s TV release, yielding nearly ₹30 crore profit.
After 2009, another one of Aamir Khan’s films — Rajkumar Hirani’s 3 Idiots — resulted in a similar outcome for Ladakh as it saw domestic tourist numbers shoot up from 48,517 before the movie’s release, to 140,000 in 2012, according to a Times of India report published in June 2013.
More Profound Than a Trip
While popular tourist destinations like the ones mentioned above might fall into the bracket of fads, cinephiles who have lived their lives in 24 frames per second often seek out joy in tracking down the most obscure places spotted in a film or show.
Moreover, such focused travelling, then, attains a kind of spirituality that informs a person’s larger life choices even. For Kolkata-based artist Soumyadeep Roy, watching Satyajit Ray’s Jalsaghar on every Bengali new year in April has been a personal ritual of sorts for years now. In 2018, he decided to visit the decadent Nimtita Rajbari palace in Murshidabad where the 1958 film was shot to allow himself to soak in the grandeur of the world Ray had conjured on celluloid. “Upon reaching there, I found out that the exterior was the exact same as in the film, but the inside looks different. Even the size of the space was much larger than it was shown to be, with multiple other houses in the same complex,” Roy says.
The film, based on a short story by the same name by Bengali writer Tarasankar Bandyopadhyay, revolves around a once-affluent Bengali zamindar who clings to music, pride and his aristocratic legacy when his life is crumbling under debts and losses. Ignoring changing times and a devastating flood, he squanders whatever little wealth remains on concerts to rival a nouveau-riche neighbour — only to lose his family, sanity and life, with his blood finally mingling with the very floodwaters he neglected. While in the original prose the flood played a central role, the film was mostly designed around the characters. “In the story, the flood-stricken characters were coming in and out of spaces in the house and taking shelter, but in the film, this is mentioned only in passing. The house also lies next to the river that floods in the story, so coupled with the ample space it has, this does add a dimension to the house when you enter it,” Roy says.
But what really took him by surprise was when he learnt that parts of Ray’s Devi (1960) were also shot in the same space. “I had done my research before going there but this trivia didn’t show up. So, imagine my surprise when I could step out of one Ray world and enter another!” Roy exclaims.
The impact this trip had on him was profound, as over the years, it has urged him to look into his likes, dislikes and affinities in the arts more closely, allowing him to study built heritage in ways that help him in his work as an artist who also documents the evolving landscape of cities and places.
A Way of Life
Sainath Saraban, a Bengaluru-based advertising filmmaker and former national creative director of advertising giant Leo Burnett, fell in love with Japan 25 years ago and let it seep into his soul. Deeply inspired by master filmmakers like Akira Kurosawa, Yasujirō Ozu and Hayao Miyazaki, Saraban didn’t go in search of specific architecture in Japan but went looking for Japan itself, as it had begun to shape the way he perceived the world and life. “When I started watching those films, I realised that those cities and structures are breathing entities, and my dream of wanting to relive those places started,” he says.
Saraban didn’t necessarily want to go exactly where the films were shot, but wished to live the lives the characters lived. He wanted to sit on a tatami mat and have his meals from bowls, to visit an izakaya and drink sake. The idea was to absorb the Japanese spirit of cutting through the noise and immerse oneself in the moment. “I wanted to hear the cadence in their voices, their inflections, how they speak in Japanese,” Saraban says.
And then, Japanese actor, filmmaker and comic Takeshi Kitano happened to him, which revealed to him the wondrous worlds of movies like Sonatine (1993), Hana-bi (1997) and Zatōichi (2003), among others, painted in the mellowed hues of the brightest colours, typical of that era of cinema in the country. “It’s when I started seeing modern-day Japan, realised what Tokyo looks like, and wanted to soak in those experiences as well.”
In 2018, however, Saraban consciously curated a cinematic tour of Japan, seen through the distinct lenses of Japanese noir cinema by the likes of directors Seijun Suzuki, Tomu Uchida, Yuzo Kawashima, all of whom were proponents of the Nikkatsu Noir genre that took Japan by storm in the 1960s. “It was the equivalent of the war films being made in France, the US and the UK back then, and they had such impeccable styling. I was influenced by the actors, the cars they drove, so I knew I needed to go and experience that architecture,” he says. And ever since, there has been no looking back.
He likens these journeys, on many of which he found himself coming of age, to the power of manifestation. “Maybe this is what they mean by manifestation, you know?” Saraban says with a laugh, as he thinks out loud about where life might take him next, with cinema being the main driving force in his upcoming adventures.
THR India film critic Rahul Desai on his cinema-inspired journeys
Over the years, I’ve travelled to around 45 countries, many of which were prompted by memorable places I first saw on screen. On a recent trip to New York, I tracked down the water-drinking fountain in a park from Alfonso Cuarón’s Great Expectations (1998), where Ethan Hawke’s Finnegan and Gwyneth Paltrow’s Estella reunite as adults.
I’ve made a habit of doing these trips solo — firstly because it involves a lot of walking, and secondly because not everyone gets excited about the same films I do. It all started back in 2013, when I set out on a Before Sunrise- and Before Sunset-inspired trip to Vienna and Paris, the cities where Richard Linklater’s romantic dramas were filmed. Until then, I didn’t realise that this was one of the many reasons I love travelling on my own terms. Every time I managed to locate one of the lesser-known spots, I’d feel a sense of accomplishment — especially in the pre-mobile data era, when foreign travel meant paper maps and guesswork.
In Vienna, I tried to follow the route the characters walk through at night, only to realise that many of the spots weren’t close by — or even realistically walkable in a single day. But the most special moment was hitchhiking to Friedhof der Namenlosen, or “Cemetery of the Nameless”, in the far east of the city, almost touching Lower Austria. It’s featured in one of my favourite scenes, near the river, and there was no other way to reach it. When I finally did, the cemetery was empty, because it isn’t a usual tourist stop. But the guard asked me if I had come after watching the movie, which means it had been a cinematic pilgrimage for others like me. I was not alone.
Even though the real-life locations can often look quite different from how they appear on screen, being in those spaces is never underwhelming — even if the place itself might be. A couple of years ago, I made a similar trip to Oslo for The Worst Person in the World (2021). While the locations were nearly unrecognisable — maybe because it was winter and the film’s emotional chaos wasn’t as palpable — the moment itself still meant everything. Because in that instant, I was alone with a film that had changed me in some way; it felt like a small personal victory. Because that’s the closest I’ll ever get to being a past version of myself.
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