Swandown

As most readers of this blog probably know I love rivers so I was very keen to see the film Swandown, which had only one showing at The Filmhouse cinema. Thankfully I managed to get to that one showing and was very glad I did!

Swandown is a gloriously eccentric British film. Two men (film maker Andrew Kötting and writer / historian / geographer Iain Sinclair) travel from Hastings on the south coast of England to Hackney in London by means of a swan shaped pedalo. Along the way they meet anglers and dog walkers and talk about what rivers mean to them. Their journey is inter-cut with archive materials about the rivers of south east England and quotations from writers including Edward Lear and Samuel Beckett. It's a wonderfully odd tribute to the unique nature of rivers with a bit of a protest against the construction of the Olympics site added in.

Hopefully the film will be shown again at some point, and all I can say is, if you get the chance to see it, do....

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