David Bramwell’s The Cult of Water & Vera Zakharov’s Riverine Resurrections: A history and celebration of the Irrepressible Waterways of Sussex

The Cult of Water David Bramwell

Combining music, animation and archive film with a captivating monologue, David Bramwell takes audiences on a dreamy candle-lit journey, in search of the supernatural secrets of our rivers, and a drowned village which has long haunted his memories.

Aided by a witch and the magician-author Alan Moore, Bramwell travels back in time to unearth the myths and rituals of our rivers, and their symbolic association with feminine power.

Can he face his demons and unravel the symbolic mysteries of our ancient ancestors? Who is the mysterious Vulcan? And will there be a pie and a pint waiting for him at the end of it all?

Riverine Resurrections: A history and celebration of the irrepressible waterways of Sussex (30mins)

Whatever happened to Sore and Ūsa, those Sussex sisters who untwined themselves from the lower Weald and snaked down to the sea? They’re still here, cut up and shackled but slowly reclaiming and revealing their old selves.

Humans have an ambivalent relationship with waterways, perceived as nourishers of the body and soul, and yet demonised (much like the deities associated with them) and used and abused as the sewers of humankind.

Vera Zakharov takes a personal, cartographic and queer ecological journey along the abstracted and re-emerging waterways of the local area to discover what nature can teach us of our own liberation.