Filmmaker Marc Tiley delivers an evocative and thoughtful visual interpretation of poet Alice Oswald’s award winning poem. The film’s total duration is 25 minutes, and is an abridged version of the full-length poem. This version featured here has been shortened to 10 minutes.
Director & Photography: Marc Tiley is a filmmaker working largely in documentary. His recent projects include, ‘Aftershock: Disaster in Nepal’ (Discovery International), and he was Director of the feature-length Mongolian music film, ‘Anda Union’, which premiered at London Film Festival 2011.
Poem/Recitation: Alice Oswald is an award-winning internationally acclaimed poet. In writing “Dart” in 2002, Alice recorded conversations over the course of three years with people who live and work on the River Dart in Devon, UK. Using these records and voices as a sort of poetic census, she created a narrative of the river, tracking its life from source to sea. The voices are wonderfully varied and idiomatic – they include a poacher, a ferryman, a sewage worker and a milk worker, a forester, swimmers, and canoeists – and are interlinked with historic myths and voices: drowned voices, dreaming voices, and marginal notes that act as markers along the way.
