Trackless Wild Director: Charlie O’Brien

“The Trackless Wild” is a lyrical documentary exploring the forgotten legacy of “A Wandering Tip,” an Irish-Argentine ballad writer whose songs once travelled the pampas. First published in the early Argentine press, these verses offer a rare glimpse of Irish life in rural Buenos Aires in the late nineteenth-century.

The film follows Tip’s songs across generations and landscapes, moving through encounters and conversations with poets, historians, and farmers, including the renowned charango player Patricio Sullivan and Mapuche singer Carina Carriqueo.

Blending live performance, archival material, animation, and poetic narration, The Trackless Wild moves between past and present, giving voice again to songs once heard across the open expanse of the pampa. A Wandering Tip’s prayer “steer my bark o’er the wild pampa main” lingers throughout, binding together past and present in a single thread.

What emerges is not a relic, but something still in movement, looking to the future. Through song, landscape, and memory, The Trackless Wild holds to a kind of prayer, a way of carrying something forward on this strange dream called the world.