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Alluvium - a programme of artist films presented by CAMPLE LINE for Nithraid 2025Saturday 23 August 2025, 12–5pm (Films loop on the hour)
All films include English & Descriptive subtitles
Location: Robert Burns Centre Film Theatre (RBCFT), Mill Road, Dumfries DG2 7BE
Alluvium is a programme of three artist films presented by CAMPLE LINE for Nithraid 2025, responding to the festival’s celebration of Dumfries’ river heritage and the River Nith as an important historic trading route. Screening at the Robert Burns Centre Film Theatre, located on the river’s edge, the programme brings together works that explore the interconnections between glacial and river systems and the social, historical, and environmental stories they hold.
Taking its name from the term 'alluvium'—the clay, silt, sand, and gravel deposited by running water—the programme expands the definition to consider the wider materials, remnants, and memories carried by rivers and glaciers. These natural flows become both subject and metaphor, guiding a loose journey from source to sea, across geographies including the Scottish Borders, the Swiss Alps, and the Jamaican coastline.
The three short films—Les Vestiges (Rebecca Birch & Sarah Casey, 2024), The Wool Aliens (Julia Parks, 2023), and a river holds a perfect memory (Hope Strickland, 2024)—each engage with the material, archival, and affective dimensions of water. Collectively, they highlight how waterways preserve and transform histories of labour, industry, colonialism, migration, and environmental change. Shot across 16mm film, digital video and archival material, the works reveal glacial and river systems as both elemental forces and living archives.
The programme runs continuously from 12–5pm, looping on the hour (final loop begins at 4pm)
Total duration: 58 minutes
PROGRAMME
Les Vestiges
Dir. Rebecca Birch & Sarah Casey | UK/France | 12 mins | 2024
Filmed in Valais and Bern, Switzerland, Les Vestiges follows artist Sarah Casey’s collaboration with glacial archaeologists Pierre-Yves Nicod and Regula Gubler. The film explores the precarity of glacial archaeology and the fragile interface between drawing, ice, and time. Using heat-sensitive drawings that visibly react to their environment, Casey visualises the often-invisible elements—heat, erosion, wind—that shape both the glacier and the archaeological artefacts emerging from it.
Set around the Loetschenpass, one of Switzerland’s most important glacial archaeological sites, the film juxtaposes delicate mark-making with massive geological shifts. It premiered at 2690m above sea level at the Loetschenpass Hut, itself part of the environment it reflects upon. Les Vestiges forms part of an extension of the ‘Emergency!’ project, asking what film can reveal about environmental transformations otherwise unnoticed or unrecorded.
The Wool Aliens
Dir. Julia Parks | UK/Jamaica | 28 mins | 2023
In this richly textured 16mm essay film, Julia Parks explores the story of early 20th-century botanist Ida Hayward, whose investigations linked the global wool industry to the migration of plant seeds via sheep’s fleeces. Filmed in the Scottish Borders, The Wool Aliens draws surprising connections between botany, trade, industry, and colonialism, tracing the ecological footprints left by textile production.
Part archival exploration, part field study, the film presents a lyrical account of how economic networks become embedded in local ecologies, specifically through the River Tweed. Parks’ footage evokes the entanglement of past and present, human and non-human, native and alien.
a river holds a perfect memory
Dir. Hope Strickland | UK | 17 mins | 2024
Spanning rivers and coastlines in Jamaica and Northern England, Hope Strickland’s evocative film examines water as a repository of memory, labour, and colonial histories. The work juxtaposes lush footage of rafting on Jamaica’s Martha Brae River and a luminous night-time journey through Falmouth’s bioluminescent lagoon, with archival material documenting industrial development in the UK, including the construction of reservoirs in Rochdale.
Through a hybrid aesthetic combining 16mm film, archival images, and LIDAR scans, Strickland explores the poetics and politics of the river. The film’s title is inspired by Toni Morrison’s writing, and its form mirrors the movements of water itself—errant, cyclical, and resistant. Originating in research around labour protests in Jamaica in 2016, the film traces diasporic and ecological connections between seemingly distant landscapes, drawing them together in the flow of memory and resistance.
Presented by CAMPLE LINE, an independent contemporary arts organisation based at Cample Mill, 15 miles north of Dumfries. We present a year-round programme of exhibitions, screenings, talks, walks, workshops and events, sharing the work of contemporary artists, filmmakers and writers from across the world with our local communities and beyond. More information on CAMPLE LINE’s projects and public programmes can be found at: campleline.org.uk
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
RBC Film Theatre, Dumfries, United Kingdom
