What better genre to tell the horror story of the national river pollution scandal than folk horror?
Cathy Wippell’s offer to River Action to be Executive Producer on her new film (she wrote it and stars in it too), Black Samphire, was a welcome surprise. She hooked me with her creativity and drive to tell a cautionary environmental story.
Together we discussed how impossible it is to ignore the news of rising water pollution levels. I recall Cathy, a keen open water swimmer, telling me that nowadays instead of just launching into the water, there are questions of hygiene and health to consider. She said, “That’s one of the horrible things about pollution; it makes people distrust the environment they themselves are destroying.”
And so we signed on and armed with a tiny budget and the creative juices of budding young filmmakers and actors. Black Samphire extracts a chilling tale from the stinking cesspool of our waterways that takes our shared mission to rescue Britain’s rivers to new audiences.
In the film, enveloped by the dark hues and eerie sounds of a ghostly marshland, a couple find themselves drawn to the strange black samphire whose tasty leaves are tinged by the effluent of a local sewage pipe.
A subtle, unsettling tale of insidious creeping horror unfolds; screaming darkly to an audience forewarned by folklore, and public outcry across the media of failing water companies, greedy multi-national agri-business and captured environmental regulators. While one character, Mari battles with an impatient boss – thank you Stephen Fry for lending your voice – Isla retreats from reality towards an ending of unwitting violence upon the love that sustains her.
The story cleverly mirrors the pernicious demise of the lifeblood of our land, turning healthy vital waterways into poison coursing through our national veins. Alongside Cathy (Mari), Ishtar Currie-Wilson (Isla) leads the tale, bringing her genre presence, crafted in the Netflix hit, Lockwood & Co, and honed in the new Omen prequel about to hit cinemas.
Noting how much she enjoyed working on Black Samphie, actor Ishtar Currie-Wilson told me, “I think that horror has always been the leading genre in making significant and accessible cultural commentary and with our current climate crisis there has never been a more important time to bring these stories to the big screen. I would expect to see a lot more environmentally focused films within the years to come.”
These two actors are going somewhere. But what about our rivers? Every single one in Britain is polluted with a toxic cocktail of agricultural run-off, raw sewage, micro-plastics and forever chemicals. By supporting this film, River Action raises the deathly spectre of the collapse of our rivers and wildlife to show viewers that this catastrophe is real and affects us all. From health risks and wildlife depletion to food production and the economy, we all need healthy rivers and abundant clean water.
A thought-provoking new tool in our campaigning box, Black Samphire adds a novel dimension to help take our powerful message to the victims of these crimes; the voting and consuming public, and perpetrators, greedy corporations as well as our failing environmental regulators. In the words of our Vice Chair, Feargal Sharkey, “We have been ripped off for too long. It’s time for urgent regulatory reform and polluting industries to clean up their mess. END RIVER POLLUTION NOW!!”
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.
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.
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
River Action has been granted consent to pursue a legal challenge against the Environment Agency over its failure to enforce critical agricultural pollution regulations called the Farming Rules for Water.
We will argue that by failing to prevent the spread of excessive levels of manure across agricultural land in the Wye river catchment, the EA has acted unlawfully by not enforcing existing rules for farmers. We are convinced that had these regulations been properly enforced, much of the horrific pollution along the River Wye could have been avoided.
Today, we have launched a crowdfunder to help with the costs of our legal challenge. If you can, please share far and wide. Thank you for your support 💚.
A huge thank you to eight-year-old Austin for sending over his brilliant invention, the ‘River Rescue Rocket’, which he created for his class’s science project as a solution to combat river pollution.
Take a read of his proposal below. Every detail has been thought out, even down to a solar-powered engine. Many of us could certainly take a leaf out of Austin’s book. Great job!
“From kicking off the year as an ambitious team of four, River Action has quickly grown into an independent organisation of twelve passionate campaigners – all of whom are driven with an unquenchable thirst to protect and restore Britain’s rivers.
“Since its inception, River Action has been focused on targeting the polluting agri-industries and the regulatory bodies responsible for enforcing existing environmental laws. This year, we won a landmark court ruling to sue the Environment Agency for failing to protect the River Wye; we filed complaints against the Red Tractor’s misleading marketing claims and we achieved a public commitment from Avara Foods to ensure their supply chain no longer contributes to excess phosphate in the Wye by 2025.
“In the summer, River Action launched the Charter for Rivers (and the Charter’s hugely popular accompanying petition) in parliament. Shortly after we attended major political party conferences and convened key discussions to maintain pressure and ensure that healthy rivers are a top voting priority ahead of the upcoming general election.
“All the while, River Action remains steadfastly committed to supporting community groups to stand up for their rivers. We have had a very successful twelve months empowering local community groups and working with citizen scientists, fellow activists and sporting heroes to hold water companies and polluting industries to account.
“We would like to thank all our supporters, donors, partners, advisors and communities for your incredible support. Our combined impact through key public and community initiatives, national media coverage and petition submission to No 10 are sending the message that it’s high time current and future governments commit to resolving the freshwater emergency before it’s too late.”
Molly Allen, River Action’s Communication’s Coordinator
River Action has written to the newly appointed Secretary of State for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs seeking urgent clarification on when DEFRA will publish its promised emergency plan to save the River Wye from ecological collapse.
Minister Steve Barclay’s predecessor, Thérèse Coffey, undertook to publish an action plan by the end autumn this year. But with days to go before the start of winter, there are growing concerns that the plan will fail to materialise, leaving the Wye facing an existential crisis with no effective mitigation strategy in place.
Founder and Chairman of River Action UK Charles Watson says, “We have written to Steve Barclay, our seventh Environment Minister in seven years, seeking urgent clarification of the whereabouts of the Government’s plan to act regarding the ecological collapse of the River Wye.
“His predecessor promised the plan by autumn this year, meaning Mr Barclay has just two weeks to make good this commitment. It would be appalling if such a critically important environmental policy action was to disappear between the cracks of DEFRA’s never-ending game of musical chairs.
“DEFRA must act now. With Natural England now having recently downgraded the environmental status of the river to “unfavourable-declining”, the situation on the Wye has reached a state of emergency, with little time left to save the river from comprehensive ecological collapse.”
Intensive poultry industry a major cause of the Wye crisis
Industrialised chicken production throughout the Wye region has now been established as one of the principal causes of the severe pollution of the river. Urgent and immediate action is now needed to end the destructive application of chicken manure across the soils of the river catchment, from where it constantly leaches into the watercourse.
Mr Watson says, “The soils of the Wye are now significantly oversaturated with phosphorus, a prime source of which originates from the continual spreading of the manure originating from the 25 million chickens that are intensively reared across the catchment. The run off of these nutrients, often exacerbated by unsustainable agricultural practices such as winter maize cropping, is the prime cause of the devastating algal blooms that are now witnessed along the length of the river system during the summer months.
“This severe ecological collapse of the iconic River Wye is one of the great environmental scandals of our times.
“The sickening and avoidable tragedy is that this situation could have been seriously mitigated had the Environment Agency properly enforced existing environmental regulations to prevent the excess application of animal waste on land that was already oversaturated with nutrients.”
High Court legal challenge against the Environment Agency
On 28th February 2024, River Action’s Judicial Review hearing will be heard in the High Court in Cardiff, where it will claim that both The Environment Agency and DEFRA have acted unlawfully in failing to adequately protect the River Wye from agricultural pollution.
Last week we saw River Action’s CEO, James Wallace, join Chris Packham live on 8 Out of 10 Bats to discuss the horrific state of our rivers and what we can do to help save them.
A huge thanks to Chris Packham, Megan McCubbin and the team at #8outof10bats for inviting us along. If you would like to view the whole episode, you can catch it here.
River Action call for Thames Water to wake up to climate change and fix its creaking infrastructure, after water treatment failure in Surrey leaves customers needing bottled water
Responding to the major incident declared by Thames Water following the Shalford wastewater treatment works failed on Saturday 4th Nov, CEO of River Action James Wallace says, “By its own admission, Thames Water has been forced to distribute nearly 500,000 litres of bottled water to support thousands of customers. It is a disgrace that a UK water company must resort to handing out even one bottle of water. This is not Haiti, this is one of the wealthiest parts of the UK.
“To blame Storm Ciaran is unacceptable. We are witnessing the water industry’s systemic lack of investment in its infrastructure and services. It can’t cope with climate breakdown, despite decades of warning to mitigate the impacts of weather-related events, forecast to get more severe.
“This water treatment failure is a consequence of decades of underinvestment by Thames Water. At the same time the company has handed out dividends to its shareholder and loaded the company with $14bn in debt. It is a failure of water quality. It is a failure of water security.
“Thames Water leaks 600 million litres of drinking water per day. It has opened no new reservoirs in decades. When will Thames Water stand up and be accountable, and invest in their infrastructure to fix leaky pipes, to reduce abstraction, to upgrade sewage systems?
Figures show that 661 hours of sewage discharge has occurred on the River Wey at Guildford and upstream of the Shalford wastewater treatment works since 1st November. Mr Wallace says, “This is a predictable and avoidable risk to people’s health and to wildlife.
“Thames Water must stop making excuses and come clean about its lack of investment, and the regulators, the Environment Agency and Ofwat, must too. Thames Water provide an essential service, like a health service coping with a pandemic. It must be climate shock proof. That means it must perform well during both storms and droughts.”
