Thursday 20 June 2013

Guest Post - Lost Rivers

The Thames isn’t the only water body flowing through London - its tributaries lie buried under layers of Victorian brick and concrete. Roads, buildings, and streams of vehicles and people move over them daily, unaware of the flux of life that moves underground. This film excavates these forgotten flows in major cities such as London, Brescia, Seoul, Toronto, and Montreal. Here, the film makes visible these unseen movements in contemporary city life, reclaimed and brought aboveground, as it were, by the network of people who are fascinated by the entrails of cities - people called ‘drainers’, urban outlaws who trespass in the name of exploration.

The film features interviews with these urban explorers, historians, city planners, amongst others, and it projects a sense of the growing importance for city dwellers to reconnect with the natural landscape that underlies all of our urban spaces. Here in London, as in other cities around the world, inhabitants are taking charge of their cities and visually reinserting history and nature into the urban fabric - which is precisely what filmmakers such as Bâcle achieve with a film like Lost Rivers.

Bâcle is based in Montreal, Canada, and is currently developing her second feature script with the support of SODEC and Telefilm Canada. She holds a BA (with distinction) in Communication Studies from Concordia University and recently completed the prestigious Masters program in Screenwriting and Producing at the University of Westminister Film School in London (UK).

Watch the trailer for Lost Rivers below:

Buy your tickets for the UK Premiere HERE. The screening is on Friday 21 June at 14:30 in conjunction with a panel discussion featuring the director Caroline Bâcle, Dave Webb (Environment Agency) and Danielle Plamondon (a Drain & Sewer Explorer), chaired by Karen Brown. Lost Rivers is screening as part of our City Stories strand, along with Grasp the Nettle, Tchoupitoulas, The Human Scale, and The Venice Syndrome.

This guest post is by Pei-Sze Chow, a current PhD student in Film Studies at University College London and one of our Screen Notes series contributors.

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