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Month: February 2024

Introducing Cathy Wippell, writer and star of ‘Black Samphire’

Posted on by lewis

© Cathy Wippell, writer and star of Black Samphire

Black Samphire is a chilling, British folk horror short film that circulates the theme of pollution, our complex relationships with our own environment and the consequences of ignoring the signs. 

Co-produced by Silicon Gothic and River Action, the film is scheduled for release in March 2024.

Q1. Tell us about yourself

I’m a writer and actor working primarily in bringing female-led, environmental and socio-political stories to the thriller and horror genres in film. I have a background in activism, having co-founded the SAFER campaign whilst studying at the University of Manchester, which went on to be featured in BBC News, the Today Show and referenced extensively in parliament debates. 

I started acting professionally after I graduated in 2021, and discovered writing and producing through my work in screen acting. My first short film, Bloom, interrogated sexual assault without ever actually explicitly mentioninging it and was created with an all-female cast and crew. The film was featured in Film Stories magazine. 

Q2. In April, 2022, you co-founded the production company, Silicon Gothic Ltd with director and producer, Joseph Archer. What was the inspiration behind creating Silicon Gothic?

The idea for Silicon Gothic stemmed from mine and Joseph’s own, personal concerns with our changing natural world. Climate change is such an overwhelming, multi-faceted issue, and we found that personifying issues like fast fashion, water pollution etc into modern, tangible monsters was a way to make these issues more digestible and understandable for our audiences.

On a more personal level, I found that writing stories with monsters like these at the core of them was a catharsis for many of my own anxieties with climate related issues. The fable-like nature of our stories hark back to my fascination with English folklore, and this is definitely an influence for us as well; with folklore being so informed by the mysteries and intricacies of our land and elements, the British folk-horror tradition is at play in a lot of Silicon Gothic’s work.

Q3.  Tell us more about the short film, Black Samphire. Where did the idea stem from and why did you want to make it?

I grew up partly in Shipton Green, Itchenor  and harvested wild samphire myself with my mother when I was little. As well as this, we also picked wild blackberries. I remember it was always a race to get the blackberries when they were just ripe, or the other families would beat you to it. This had me thinking about human greed, and the hunger to use up our natural resources from an early age.

I’ve always been a keen open water swimmer and, as I mentioned, it was hard to ignore the news this summer of rising water pollution levels, especially when two of my local swimming spots were fenced off for a time. Seeing how the world changes in such a short time, and in the place I grew up trusting my environment so much, deeply disturbed me; instead of just launching into the water, there were questions of hygiene and health to ask. That’s one of the horrible things about pollution; it makes people distrust the environment they themselves are destroying. 

So, armed with these ideas, I wanted to create a story about overconsumption set in the marshlands in West Sussex. When River Action came on board as executive producers, they really helped to bring out the element of water pollution that was present in the script. Their expertise and information resources steered the story to more explicitly address the issue as the ‘monster’ of the narrative.

On the 31st of July, 2023, as we were beginning pre-production, an Unearthed investigation found that ‘over 300,000 hours of sewage spills hit England and Wales most protected habitats’ in 2022. On the 5th of August 2023, as we were well into pre-production, fifty seven triathletes were hospitalised after partaking in the Sunderland triathlon championship due to swimming in polluted water. Now, just as we’ve finished the film, the UK’s ‘urgent’ plan to tackle the sewage pollution crisis has been delayed by four months, with no date of publication in sight (Source: The Guardian).

In other words, the water pollution crisis in the UK has been present throughout the whole process of this film. What’s more, it won’t go away anytime soon, unless we take urgent action. The ever increasingly relevant issue of water pollution on the British Isles has shaped ‘Black Samphire’ from start to finish, and will continue to inform the project’s journey.

Q4.  You have worked on Black Samphire as both writer and actor – do you enjoy the extra responsibility that this entails?

To be honest, writing and acting in the same project is always a huge positive for me; as I’m lucky enough to be with the characters from when they were literally created in my imagination, I often find that most of my character work has been done and interrogated throughout the script writing process. So, this makes my life easier on set, as it’s really easy to switch into character quickly. 

I’d say the extra responsibility on this film actually came from mine and Joseph’s shared responsibility with the company. As the marshlands are actually quite precarious to shoot on due to uneven ground and swampy, soft land (we had an issue with a sinking light at one point!), we had to make sure proper risk assessments and safety checks were carried out for the safety of the cast and crew. We did so many recces of those wetlands – maybe about six or seven despite the fact that I was already familiar with the area. 

Q5. Do you have any favourite moments from the shoot?

One of my favourite moments has to be when we were shooting the final scene. Without giving away too much, there’s a part in the film where Isla has to spit black gunk out of her mouth. The blocking for the scene had me lying in the marsh, with Ishtar (who plays Isla) leaning over me. As we were about to shoot, there was a concern with costume continuity as we needed my costume the next day, sans black gunk. 

So, Ishtar said ‘Don’t worry, I’ll spit it so it doesn’t go anywhere near the costume’. And you can guess what happened next – it went all over me and it was hilarious. It’s a very intense, emotional scene, and having that happen was so unexpected and funny that it was difficult for a moment to stay in character!

Having James and Erica from River Action visit the set was also a highlight for me. It was really great to share the set experience with them, and to have them there from script stage all the way through to the distribution phase is very special indeed.

Q6. What are you looking forward to working on next?

For me, ‘Black Samphire’ is my primary focus at the moment. The short film is actually a proof of concept for a full-length feature, so I’ve already started working on the treatment, and then I’ll be looking for commissioning to write the feature script itself. I feel a real sense of urgency with this story and narrative, so it’s going to be a matter of working on the feature as the short undertakes its festival circuit. 

Silicon Gothic will be pitching a slate of films, including Black Samphire, at the Cannes film festival this year, as well as other international and national film markets throughout the year.

– Cathy Wippell, Co-founder of Silicon Gothic

A final line of defence: combatting the slow, agonising death of the River Wye

Posted on by lewis

The agonising death of the River Wye has unfolded in recent years like a car crash
in slow motion.

This magnificent watercourse, so often voted our country’s most loved river, has in
recent years been assaulted by a deluge of pollution from intensive agriculture,
causing prolonged algal blooms which turn the river each year into a putrid green
soup, snuffing the life out of the river by starving it of oxygen and light.

How could this have happened to a river with some of the highest available
environmental protections, such as its Special Area of Conservation (SAC) status?
One answer can be found in 2018 when Tesco awarded Avara Foods, the Cargill
owned Hereford-based poultry processor, its principal contract to supply chicken
meat. To satisfy our largest food retailer’s insatiable weekly demand for three million
chickens, a spate of planning applications was waived through by local councils to
build dozens of new intensive poultry units (IPUs). The net result today is over 24
million birds being reared at any one time across the Wye river catchment – around
a quarter of the country’s total poultry production.

These huge chicken sheds are today’s equivalent of the infamous Dark Satanic Mills
of Victorian times. Their production cycle starts with hundreds of thousands of tiny
chicks (or pullets) being stuffed with feed imported from Cargill’s intensive soy farms
in deforested Amazonia (therein lies another scandalous tale of environmental
destruction). Within six weeks these force-fed birds (which although fully-grown are
not able to walk due to the speed in which they have been “produced”) are whisked
off to become Tesco special offer drumsticks or some ready meal.

But the worst is yet to come. 

The tens of thousands of tons of excrement in which these wretched creatures
waddle during their short miserable lives is then shovelled out of the sheds and
dumped across the fields of the Wye Valley and elsewhere.  In a short period of time
this industrial-scale manure dumping has caused the land of the river catchment to
become overdosed by several times the level of phosphorous that can ever be
absorbed naturally by what grows there. And each year more gets added.

The extraordinary thing is that we believe doing this is often in breach of the law. The
2018 Farming Rules for Water created a set of protections for watercourses to
prevent agricultural pollution. The most important of these in our view is Regulation
4, which states that it is illegal to apply to the land organic manure or manufactured
fertilisers in a manner that would “exceed the needs of the soil and crop on that
land”. 

If this law to prevent nutrient oversaturation had been properly enforced, then we
argue that the horrendous pollution of the Wye catchment could have largely been
prevented. However, we believe effective lobbying by the National Farmers Union
led to DEFRAinstructing the Environment Agency to turn a blind eye to enforcing this critical
protection. Disappointingly, the EA has slavishly followed the instructions of its
political masters and the tragic consequences are all too plain to see.

Determined to challenge this state of affairs, River Action has spent the last 12
months clawing our way through a tortuous legal process to be able to hold the
Environment Agency and DEFRA to account through a Judicial Review. Finally, we
made to the High Court this week where we faced up to the combined force of the
legal teams of the Environment Agency, DEFRA and the NFU. The latter at the last
minute gate-crashed the legal proceeding to defend the rights of its members to
continue to dispose of manure in a manner, we believe, pollutes rivers.

At the core of our legal case is our view that the EA has acted unlawfully by not
enforcing these regulations. In doing so, we believe it has also failed dismally in its
statutory duty to protect the SAC of the River Wye. 

As the river continues its death spiral (its environmental status was recently
downgraded by Natural England to just one notch up from being pronounced dead),
there remain a few rays of hope. Faced with a huge public outcry, Avara has now
acknowledged its role in polluting the Wye and has pledged that all manure
produced by its supply chain will be exported out of the river catchment. Meanwhile,
a small number of exemplary poultry producers, such as the 625,000-bird Whittern
Farms in Herefordshire, have started recycling their chicken manure into phosphate-
rich pelletised fertiliser. This in turn is sold to arable farms in East Anglia to substitute
imported chemical fertilisers.

However, whilst these individual initiatives must be welcomed, they will not move the
dial if the environmental regulations designed to protect our rivers are not robustly
enforced.

Communities up and down the Wye and along other rivers across the nation will now
be anxiously awaiting the judge’s deliberations on our Judicial Review. Many of
these inspiring river activists were with us this week demonstrating outside the court
in Cardiff as we went in to begin the Judicial Review hearing.

We can but dare to hope that the courts provide our long-suffering rivers with a final
line of defence, given the abject failure of those government agencies whose job it
should have been to protect them.
 
Charles Watson
Chairman and Founder, River Action

River Action take Environment Agency and DEFRA to court

Posted on by lewis

Landmark legal action to save River Wye from pollution

Hundreds of people fearful for the ecological collapse of the River Wye, including river campaigner Feargal Sharkey, today gathered outside Cardiff’s Civil Justice Centre supporting a landmark legal case pursued by River Action against the Environment Agency and DEFRA. 

The core of the Judicial Review is River Action’s belief that by failing to enforce critically important environmental regulations, the Environment Agency has acted unlawfully; and in doing so has failed to protect the Special Area of Conservation of the River Wye from the huge levels of diffuse agricultural pollution that has caused so much of the recent ecological collapse of the river.

Outside of Cardiff’s Civil Justice Centre, Chair and Founder of River Action Charles Watson, flanked by a 10ft tall giant puppet called the Goddess of the Wye, a steel drumming band, River Action’s legal team Leigh Day, lead barrister David Wolfe KC, Feargal Sharkey, Friends of the River Wye and many more concerned community groups, said:

“The agonising death of the River Wye has unfolded in recent years like a car crash in slow motion. This magnificent watercourse, so often voted our country’s most loved river, has in recent years been assaulted by a deluge of pollution from intensive agriculture, causing prolonged algal blooms.

“A major cause for this is the recent exponential growth of intensive poultry production within the catchment of the River Wye, which supplies millions of chickens a week to the nation’s leading supermarket retailer Tesco.  At any one time there are as many as 24 million birds reared in the Wye valley – approximately a quarter of the country’s total poultry production.

“The thousands of tons of excrement from these birds is then shovelled out of the sheds and dumped across the fields of the Wye Valley and elsewhere. This industrial-scale manure dumping has caused the land of the river catchment to become overdosed by several times the level of phosphorous that can ever be absorbed naturally by what grows in the valley. And each year more gets added.

“If the law to prevent nutrient oversaturation had been properly enforced, then we argue that the horrendous pollution of the Wye catchment could have largely been prevented. However, we believe effective lobbying by the National Farmers Union led to DEFRA instructing the Environment Agency to ignore enforcing this critical protection – effectively giving the intensive poultry industry carte blanche to dump the manure they produce across the Wye Valley, thus causing untold environmental damage to the River Wye. Endangered species like the Atlantic Salmon are on the cusp of localised extinction. We are asking for something very simple of the Government: please enforce the law.”

Crowdfunder to help cover River Action’s legal costs
This legal challenge presents a unique and urgent opportunity to force the Environment Agency to do its job and finally start to enforce the laws that exist to protect our rivers. In doing so it can help save the River Wye and ensure that its polluters are held to account.  However, the predicted costs of this critically important legal case will exceed £60,000. 

Chair and Founder of River Action Charles Watson said, “Please, if you can, help us cover our legal fees, research, and campaign costs to ensure the biggest impact is made.”

For interviews call Ian Woolverton on 07377 547 362 or email media@riveractionuk.com

Support our legal crowdfunder

STATEMENT: River Action responds to rising water bills

Posted on by lewis

Responding to the news that the average household water and sewerage bill in England and Wales will rise by 6% or about £27 to £473 a year from April 1, CEO of River Action James Wallace said:

“While support for lower income households is welcome, when the water industry says £14.4 billion will be invested by water companies what they really mean is most of the money will be paid by customers, again. 

 “Ultimately the Government is to blame for allowing water companies to profiteer while manipulating water pricing downwards over the past 14 years, creating a false illusion of cheap water, without even considering the costs of inflation. 

 “The suggestion that customers should pay more for water will be a very tough message to sell when the bills they have already paid water companies have been squandered on shareholder dividends and CEO bonuses rather than investing in maintaining leaky infrastructure. 

 “Why should the public pay twice for the modernisation and maintenance of sewage treatment and water resources? What assurances will the Government provide to ensure customer money is actually spent on promised water security and cutting pollution? Having overseen corporate daylight robbery for years, rebuilding trust will be key. 

 “And when will this Government commit to restructuring failing water companies and reform and refund the ragged skeletal remains of the Environment Agency and Ofwat? The freshwater emergency demands immediate systemic change to avert widespread ecocide and water shortages that will affect millions.”

ENDS:

For enquiries, comment or further information, please contact:

  • Ian Woolverton, Senior PR Coordinator: 07377 547 362; ian@riveractionuk.com