Filming Cornwall's Red River

Filming Cornwall's Red River will involve making a 30minute documentary TV film for transmission on BBC4 TV about the research findings of the AHRC ECR LF project Red River: Listening to a Polluted River (AH/S012303/1). The BBC has agreed to air the programme on BBC4 during October 2021 as part of its celebration of National Poetry Month. The BBC are a partner on the project, contributing cash and in-kind costs (although they are unable, for legal and business reasons, to state the value of air-time and other costs associated with transmissions). The programme will contain extracts from the long poem written as the practice-as-research output for the original Red River AHRC project.

In the 1880s, the river was described as one of the most lucrative in the world because of the mineral wealth generated from the mine sediments carried in its water. After the collapse of mining in Cornwall in the 1990s, the mining district of Pool, Redruth and Camborne, through which the Red River flows, became one of the poorest in Europe. The impact of this shift has been dramatic and traumatic. Now, with investment flowing back into Cornwall to fund the 'ethical' extraction of rare-earth metals like lithium and cobalt, and 'enabling metals' like tin, the area is again being described as the UK's mineral 'Klondike'. This is the right moment to think about the river's past, present and future as a complex human/nature hybrid subject shaped by extractive industries, and to use the poem (and associated research) composed for the Red River project to inform a BBC4 TV documentary about the river that will foreground the issues it raises at a national level.

The film will cross BBC TV's arts and nature programme genres. It will take an innovative filming approach to the small-scale, damaged and sometimes 'ugly' appearance of the river and celebrate its complexity as a neglected human/natural hybrid landform rich in culture significance, and damaged and recovering biodiversity. The film will explore questions about the future of the river and, by extension, other mistreated minor watercourses. Interviewees will be drawn from the pool of individuals who have contributed to and shaped the research project, and will include local voices as well as academics and experts. Interviews will be conducted on location at sites along the Red River to ensure the programme is local in its engagement with the detail, but of national and even global significance in terms of landscape debates around remediation and local community engagement.

We will hold live regional screenings and panel discussions with our regional partners to ensure that the film reaches local audiences who do not usually access BBC4 TV, and to debate and record impact responses to the issues it raises. These events may take place at the Eden Project, Heartlands, The Cornubian Arts and Science Trust and the Environment Sustainability Centre at the Penryn Campus of Exeter University. These events form part of the existing programme of impact and engagement activities planned for the second half of 2021 as part of the Red River project.

The PI will present and co-write the script with the independent ex-BBC producer Simon Willis. The scripting, organising, interviews and filming will take place over a period of approximately two months from the start date of the award. The film will greatly enhance, through creative and innovative filming, the impact of the original AHRC-funded Red River project. Project viewing figures for the programme range between 300 000 & 600 000.