Following an encounter with a lute playing, maverick Pocahontas enthusiast in Essex, UK, during the summer of 2007, artist Anna Lucas travelled around Virginia, USA in fall 2007, using the local legendary female figure of Pocahontas as a virtual guide.
This film presents academic and personal accounts of episodes in the life of Pocahontas including interviews with a Chelmsford anthropologist, Jamestown archaeologist, ancestors of Powhatan tribe and other people of both communities encountered en route. The work navigates the delicate and passionate opinions of these diverse storytellers, without attempting to uphold factual accuracy, but instead revealing different forms of truth and knowledge. The voices are fore-grounded by images of hunting and fishing and estuary landscapes of Essex and Chesapeake Bay.
The work also features shanties and specially written folksongs sung on location in Harwich by American singer Dani Siciliano and rising folk-inspired singer Mara Carlyle.