Cinema was our first window onto the world, and years later we still turn to it for dreams and inspiration. These are the best travel movies according to the School of Travel Journalism, with a note on what each one can teach anyone who wants to tell a journey.
Adapted from the Spanish original by Alberto Piernas.
As a child, I discovered that a certain cathedral stood in Paris by watching Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I also dreamed of wandering the Montmartre of Amélie and boarding a train across India like the characters in Slumdog Millionaire.
You probably wanted to follow the friends of Y tu mamá también to a hidden Mexican beach, chase Julia Roberts halfway around the world in Eat Pray Love or get lost in the Italian countryside of Call Me by Your Name.
Long before travel blogs or #wanderlust feeds, film was our first glimpse of faraway places and the best push to start that trip around the world. If you are in the mood for popcorn, here are the best travel movies to watch on your favourite streaming platform (availability varies by country).
What makes a great travel movie?
A great travel movie uses the journey to change the character, not just the scenery. The landscape matters, but what stays with you is how a road, a city or a stranger forces someone to see themselves differently. That is exactly what good travel writing does too.
Nomadland
Life on the road in a camper van has become a way of life for many people around the world. Some do it for passion; others, like the protagonist of Nomadland, out of necessity. Frances McDormand won the Oscar for playing Fern, a woman from Nevada who travels across the United States in a van after losing everything in the 2008 financial crisis. Directed by Chloé Zhao, the film explores the hardships (and rewards) of the strange freedom experienced by modern nomads looking for answers on the margins of society.
What to learn from it: how real people and real places, many of them non-actors, give a story its weight.
Into the Wild
Into the Wild tells the true story of Christopher McCandless, a young man who left everything behind to travel across the United States and into the Alaskan wilderness. He was looking for total immersion in nature and an escape from a troubled family past. His own notes were gathered by writer Jon Krakauer for the bestseller the film is based on, directed by Sean Penn.
What to learn from it: how a reporter like Krakauer reconstructs a journey from diaries, interviews and places, which is reporting at its best.
The Motorcycle Diaries
Che Guevara is an icon of Latin America, but fewer people know about his journeys across the continent. Gael García Bernal plays the young Ernesto Guevara and Rodrigo de la Serna his companion, Alberto Granado, in this road movie that follows them through the Andes to Venezuela in 1952 on their motorbike, La Poderosa. It is a film for the senses, shaped by the silence of the Atacama Desert and the lush Peruvian Amazon.
What to learn from it: how a trip can be the story of a transformation, told through the people met along the way.
Lost in Translation
There are two kinds of people: those who find Lost in Translation a sleepy postcard of Japan, and those who read the powerful message between the lines. Sofia Coppola‘s film follows a fading actor (Bill Murray) and the young wife of a photographer (Scarlett Johansson) who meet in Tokyo, among neon signs, karaoke bars and Shinto temples that only reveal how much we need to connect with someone in an impersonal world.
What to learn from it: how to write the feeling of being a foreigner, the jet lag and the loneliness, without mocking the place.
Before Sunrise
Who has not lived a passionate romance on the road, and then remembered it years later? A perfect blend of romance and travel, Before Sunrise follows Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy), who meet on a train across Europe and spend one night together in Vienna. It is the first part of a trilogy completed by Before Sunset and Before Midnight, both just as recommended.
What to learn from it: dialogue. A city can be revealed almost entirely through conversation as two people walk it.
Watch like a travel journalist
Film is one of the most powerful forms of storytelling there is, and a constant source of ideas for anyone who wants to tell a story differently. Watch these travel movies with a notebook: note how each one opens, how places are introduced and how the journey changes the main character.
Want to turn that way of seeing into stories of your own? Discover the online Master in Travel Journalism at the School of Travel Journalism.
