The Cult of Water, plus Short films and live music

A morning of film, music and live performance.

Glitter and Storm

Director: Rebecca E Marshall, 16mins, 2012

Water, sunlight, breathing and skin – this is a submersion into the joy of sea swimming by night and by day, between transcendent glitter and the wild energies of advancing storm systems. Portraits of swimmers are filmed in the sea off the coast of Hastings in the South East of the UK. Delightfully complemented with sounds alchemised by Susan Stenger.

"This film is a delight, a drench, a dream: as reviving as the thing it depicts, the elective rinse in the English Channel" - Iain Sinclair

I Am Weather

Directors: Rebecca E Marshall & Nichola Bruce, 6mins, 2019, UK

A woman’s body shifts and vibrates through water in a process of doing and undoing. The elemental force of water moves between torrent, boiling rage and steam. Performer Clare Whistler appears held in a slackened gravity that allows shifts between existing and becoming. The film shivers with aversion, uncertainty and moves forward with love.

Filmed in The Library of Water in Stykkisholmur, Iceland. The building overlooks the ocean and the town, and houses 24 glass columns containing water collected from the major glaciers around Iceland.

The Cult of Water

Combining music, animation and film with a captivating monologue, David Bramwell takes you on a candle-lit, dream-like journey in search of the secrets of our waterways, and a drowned village that has long haunted his memories.

The Cult of Water takes us from Yorkshire right into Hastings to end with the remarkable story of the lost spring of St Helen’s Woods, how it came to be unearthed and how it just might have saved someone’s life.’

From Doncaster (where he grew up) Bramwell travels up the river Don and back in time, through the ladybird plague and drought of 1976 to the heavily polluted Don of Sheffield’s steel industry, up into the Pennines and back into a pre-Christian era when rivers and springs were worshipped as living deities.

Along the journey, Bramwell battles with his own thalassophobia (the fear of ‘what lurks beneath’); learns about hydromancy from magician Alan Moore, discovers a unique forest of figs growing on the banks of the Don and encounters Jarvis Cocker on his own adventures, sailing down the Don on an inflatable inner tube.

His journey finally brings him face to face with the goddess of primordial waters, Danu, who gave her name to the Don.

While using the Don as the focal point for a psycho-geographical journey, at heart this is a meditation on the symbolic power of rivers and inland waterways and the profound ways in which they affect our sense of well-being.

Live song from Chalk Horse Music

Singer and story collector Liz Pearson will intersperse this special event with a small collection of beautiful, mesmerising songs that she makes with Chalk Horse Music. The name comes from the figure of a horse carved into the side of the hill in the Cuckmere Valley.

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