Stills from Slack Water, 2023
What does it mean to revisit a hometown, and look at it through the lens of who you are now? What do we see reflected back at us in the waters of our coastlines?
Death and rebirth, from the personal to the historical. A place is a living, breathing monument to what once was in the individual and collective memory. How do we then relate that to the present and future?
Slack Water is part semi-autobiographical documentary, part exploration of memory and identity through place, people and landscape. Personal experience, family histories, and the local identity of a town subject to industrial decline.
Water is used as a motif both for its symbolism of renewal and transformation, and for its significance to those who grew up in coastal towns – simultaneously a familiar comfort, and a potential danger. Don’t walk out to sea when the tide turns.