Wading within the waters & the wild.
on a childhood immersed in a brook, & creatively curating a festival of riverine film.
By James Murray white – Curator of the Rivers of film Festival
Returning To Washpit Brook
I felt a strong compulsion in my waters & bones last week to return to the stream of my childhood, Washpit Brook in Girton, and to re-engage with her flow. Every so often I must meander back – this was a sanctuary of nature all those years ago, and remains so.
Away from the oddness of the human world – though we brought all our growing issues and experiments there too – the tunnel under the disused road that the brook flows through housed us and was shelter many times, and the small oak copse bathes all in beauty.
A Brook With History
Reading up these days on the brook’s physical and cultural history I learn it once was a place of geese, long before my time, whose quills were sent off to University scholars, and that some call it a chalk stream – one of the less than 200 that bubble up through the world, and yet others don’t, as it flows over a gravel bed. Girton means ‘town built upon gravel’, and a modern metal fence surrounds the church representing the Girton geese history, as does the village sign – and hope that someday soon this gorgeous place of sanctity & more than human sanctuary will be equally cherished. It’s clear from online documents from the Environment Agency and others that recent development of the nearby Eddington Campus has caused flooding through the lengthy of the brook, into neighbouring fields through the village.
I consulted Girton local educator & founder of Cam Valley Forum, Stephen Tompkins (who taught me biology at Impington Village College) on the history of the brook, who succinctly placed the brook within a confluence of local streams and brooks, connecting through all the South Cambs villages and edge lands of my youth – the meeting places of flow, imagination, Industry (mills, washing sheep and draining water for agriculture), and that sticklebacks and other flora and fauna have been seen in some of them in recent years.
“We come from water, and water runs through us. It carries our chemistry and our stories. It shows us more than itself: all the colours and none. We are mostly water for all of our lives, but water is only us for a short time before it becomes something else.”
From ‘The Flow – on rivers, water, and wildness’ (2023, UK)
Amy-Jane Beer
Amy-Jane will lead a walk for ‘Rivers Of Film’ on Friday 3rd October: see here for info.
Rivers As Teachers
This brook was the watery vessel of my youth, and propelled me into many rivers in the UK as I’ve learned to navigate (and sink many times) over the years since. My journey has been through the arts, and documenting humans and the more than human through the
Lens. Filming water is the hardest experience. This takes a certain eye, & a certain stillness.
Within still & moving water we sink, swim, heal, and grow, and move, and float.
Water supports all life. Does water need us?
Our exploitation of water – rivers, seas, tributaries, reservoirs, streams & pools – continues.
And yet – can we stop and learn from the waters? Can we re-engage with the elements & be held by re-enchantment?
The Rivers Of Film Festival
The ‘Rivers Of Film’ Festival is my opportunity to bow and thank the Washpit Brook, the River Cam, the River Mel, the Coldham’s Brook, the newly named Newmarket Chalk Stream, & all the waters of this area that have held & supported me in my time growing and just being here.. This is a collection of films, long form and short, including the micro-commissions we have spent half of the budget upon – giving voice & screen time to those who wanted to point their lenses at their local waters and report back to us on the life & river actions happening locally – on the Dart, the Wye, the Avon, the Lugg, the Arrow, the Elan, the Edw, the Cleddau and so many more.
The Key themes of the festival are to stimulate & share knowledge, talk, create & strengthen existing communities, enable action, while using compassion & creativity. In short, with a head, hands & heart approach.
We wish to work with and build upon the crucial work of local groups who have been operating in the water space for many a long while: Cam Valley Forum, Friends Of The River Cam, Friends of the River Granta (FROG), the River Mel Restoration Group, Hobson’s Conduit Trust, Water Sensitive Cambridge, Cam Conservators, as well as the City Council & their new Chalk Streams Project, and more, including others that we don’t yet know of!
Celebrating Local Water Heroes
We wish also to celebrate local water hero’s too. We wish everyone to step up and become a guardian to their local river or waterway, in whatever way possible. We seek to draw upon the wonderful phrase by academic Donna Harraway in ‘staying with the trouble’, i.e connecting to the issues of your locality, & being right in there, in it. This is a theme we will draw out further on our final night, after the screening of Tony Eva’s important film about 9 Wells & the Hobson’s Conduit in Cambridge, to be screened at the Leper Chapel on Newmarket Road on Saturday 4th October – book here.
The festival will have showcased 12 events over 2 weeks in non-cinema venues to reach into every demographic of this City: from a village hall, to 2 Museums, a lecture theatre, a farmer’s barn, an old church beautifully restored into a college auditorium, a community arts space on the edge of town, to a beautiful ancient chapel that is thought to be the City’s 2nd oldest building, housing monastics & the sick and now part of Cambridge Past Present & Future’s estate.
We hope to put on more over the coming months too! So we’ll listen to all the audience feedback, and hope to expand further. There are more films on these riverine themes available too! Watch this space. Let us know what you want to see.
Flowing Into Memory
And, come the middle of October, all these festival events will be rivulets flowing away within the streams of our conscious memory. Thoughts & snippets of films, conversations, laughter, resolution, the vision of an eel or a pike, Meg’s marriage to the River Avon, sadness, despair, ocean trawling, water testing, signal crayfish, the ongoing saga of Bait’s Bite Lock, all the local river infrastructure, and the sight of 33 swans cruising above the river at Fen Ditton, and the fabulous cormorant tree full of vigilant creatures opposite the Technology Museum…….
“A real change in direction requires a mode of thought that rejects assumptions about human exceptionalism and recognises that all living kinds are part of a single interconnected system. How might this kind of thinking be enacted in practise?
In order to have a meaningful effect it surely needs to permeate all areas of human activity, at every scale, but let us consider how this might be employed to reframe human-non-human relations within river catchment areas”
Veronica Strang
‘Water Beings – from nature worship to the environmental crisis’ 2023.
Veronica Strang is an Oxford cultural anthropologist whose work explores human relationships with water. She will join us at the celebration event on world rivers day at Pembroke.
