Story
From some years in the future a woman looks back to an encounter between her younger self and a water sprite (a Nixie) on the Mendips, where she has taken refuge to escape rising sea levels. They meet by chance at a well house above covering a well shaft - a portal connecting the surface environment with the world of underground rocks and rivers. The Girl has lost a small heirloom in the form of a dragonfly, and the Nixie has emerged to seek the cause of environmental changes disturbing his world. They form a brief but intense relationship. As the Nixie takes his leave the Girl takes some photographs which, however, don’t register on her photo stream. She walks away from the Well House towards an uncertain future…
The Nixie
The film originated as part of a project to renovate a small, historic structure covering a well shaft on Broadfield Down, North Somerset. It creates an imaginative context for a site that links the visible world and the hidden world of ground water.
Characters
INSERT IMAGE: Nixie
The Nixie is a shape-shifting water sprite originating in German folklore mischievous and sensitive. In the film he comes to the surface to discover causes of the disturbances to his world of groundwater. He takes the form of a farmer to ‘look like he belongs’ an, although sceptical of humanity and our exploitative tendencies, he comes to trusts the Girl as she joins his dance.
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The Girl has grown up in a town but now, having been forced from her home by the floods, is adjusting to life in a rural setting where she feels ‘out of place’. After the Nixie has gone she reflects: ‘Did he exist? On my photo stream? In my memory? My imagination?’
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Drawing inspiration from the natural world, the dragonfly hairclip lost by the Girl is an emblem of beauty, transience, and fragility, the embodiment of memories and values across generations.
Image and Sound
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Dance is ephemeral act, each gesture and movement existing in a moment of time, in time (to music) and out of time (when re-created through memory) and gives powerful expression to thoughts, feelings and ideas. Joining together in dance is a creative collaboration, opposed to social activities that confront, exploit, damage..
The first dance expresses the Nixie’s puzzlement, anger and frustration with the impact of human activity on water sources above and below ground.
The second dance in which the Girl joins, celebrates the life-enhancing possibilities of working in and with the natural world – a dance rather than a dual – with references to a few water-related faunae, ending with a dragonfly …
INSERT IMAGE: Girl takes photo
Setting, time and place
The well shaft connects the visible world and the invisible world of groundwater – ‘a portal’ in the words of the Nixie. As the setting for a magic realist film, it also combines the world of lived experience with an imagined world. The story ends yet lives on in the realms of memory and imagination; the characters disappear but the setting remains, subject to change in its own time frame as it slowly disintegrates. Several time frames co-exist within the film, the various animate and inanimate elements existing in time according to materials qualities, form and functions and each subject to temporal change in its own time.