'Making the film has itself served as a rather bare form of therapy, forcing me to sit with sadness...' Director Susan Thomson explores processing grief in her latest film, The Swimming Diaries, which premieres at this year's Dublin International Film Festival.
Below, she discusses the origin of the film, and bringing her book to screen.
Breaststroke: Opening curtains, Searching and searching through a crowd, a yawn, opening a book, washing windows, looking in a wardrobe, the end of a hug.
The Swimming Diaries began life as notes, diary entries on my laptop, to help deal with what I was going through in losing my Mum prematurely, to cancer, a diary of my swimming, and the Swimathon I was doing to raise money for Marie Curie.
At that time entering the water felt like entering another realm, one of escape. The diaries became a book shortly after her death - somewhere between memoir, translation, conceptual art and poetry - at first a limited edition of one yellow hardback book that then began its own journey - the book, exactly 25,000 words long, each word representing a stroke, the 25,000 metres or strokes I swam during the month when my Mum was dying. It very much exceeded any expectations I had for it, seeming to take on a life of its own, travelling, being exhibited in various galleries in Dublin, at Tate Modern, London, X Initiative, New York and Artbook@PS1MoMA, New York, before finding a home for itself for many years in multiple paperback form at the PS1 Museum of Modern Art bookshop in New York City (a memorial I think my Mum would have loved!).
Artists and producers began suggesting it could be a film and I began a notebook of ideas:
– Greek mythological rivers of grief might structure the film
– The film could be a functional way of people dealing with grief
– There would be some voiceover
– It could show the effects of morphine by being stylised, surreal in character
– It would continue translation as a concept, translating swimming into raising money, for nurses, who came the last four nights of my Mum's life; swimming into words
– The film would be like a piece of music with refrains and repetitions
– It would use archive video of that time and archive of musical theatre my Mum directed
– A gift, memorial, spiritual sense
– Unconscious or dreamlike time and so on.
Just under two years ago, the film started to come to fruition in my mind. Cinema, as a moving image, seemed the way to go with this work, with its spectral qualities, its 24 or 25 frames per second - a little like my lengths, a frame could represent a stroke. Dance and gesture began to seem the clear way to translate this book, echoing the more abstract movement of a swim which was its origin, a physical representation of grief, inexpressible in language.
While the film deals with sadness, it is in the end not a sad film.
A Reel Art Award from the Arts Council then allowed the book to begin its metamorphosis into film. Increasingly I saw The Swimming Diaries as alchemical, in perpetual transformation, as if movement were its essence. I hope it contains transformative potential too, allowing people to grieve their own losses with the film. As an artwork it is already transforming again, sonically - Instant Karma Classics Records will be releasing a soundtrack album of Donna McKevitt’s stunningly beautiful music for the film later this year. She has previously released one of her albums with the same label - Translucence, filmmaker Derek Jarman’s words set to music - so I feel in very good company here.
I was also lucky enough to work again with IFTA-winning Director of Photography Piers McGrail who shot my first film fifteen years ago and has created incredibly striking imagery for the film. And to work with fantastic Mufutau Yusuf who initially trained with Irish Modern Dance Theatre. The New York Times said, "When Mufutau Yusuf is on stage it’s hard to look anywhere else." His performance together with the incredible performances from all the dancers, and actors, including raw performances from Isabella Oberländer and my brother Richard Thomson, who is also an actor, and takes on the role of himself here. In addition, on a separate shoot in the South of France, I worked with free diver and dancer Julie Gautier to create otherworldly imagery, as a kind of angel or shapeshifting Greek river spirit, ferrying the dead. Editing the film with me was the superb Fernando de Juan. I had certain apprehensions about making the film, from all sorts of perspectives, about digging up the past, for me and my family.
Making the film has itself served as a rather bare form of therapy, forcing me to sit with sadness. What has made this possible and even redemptive, has been the incredible connections made during the film, and the beauty of the film itself. I have felt supported by these fantastic collaborators and the other very many talented and generous people, from costume designers to production and more, with whom I have worked, people sharing their own losses with me, connecting deeply about the human condition, and making the film with love as a central ingredient.
While the film deals with sadness, it is in the end not a sad film. Instead, audiences have called it mesmerising, gripping and striking - it has transformed me, and I think, some of those working on the film to an extent, allowing the grief I held in my body to begin moving again, out of me, back into life. The film looks at the very heart of creativity, what it is, and in its further translations from text into film and music album, and beyond, The Swimming Diaries seems to have a power and shapeshifting quality, and adds to the already formidable legacy of my mum, herself a teacher and Director of amateur musical productions and co-founder of Pied Piper Theatre Company.
The Swimming Diaries premieres at Dublin International Film Festival on February 28th - find out more here. The Swimming Diaries book is available to purchase at the IFI, Dublin and here.
