Taking Bristol's story of connection to nature to Colombia with Wildscreen Festival!

Wildscreen festival have championed this very Bristol story and are just about to take our message of love and connection to Latin America! 

Back in 2024, when I was getting the film ready for a festival run, I was overjoyed to be selected for one of the world’s leading Wildlife festivals and Wildscreen Festival’s forty-second festival. I was even more astounded to receive their Sustainable Merit Award. 

This film is about people’s relationship to rivers, the love they have for our precious rivers and how they feel loved back. And then how they fight for them, in very Bristol ways! We build a sustainable world when we are able to connect with it.

Rave On for the Avon was then selected to be part of the Wildscreen Tour screening in Exeter and London as part of London Rivers Week.

And now our story of love and connection to nature is travelling even further afield to Columbia with Wildscreen! I will be travelling to the Andes of Quindío with Wildscreen Festival and the British Council in June. We will screen the film at Cine en las Montañas Festival (Cinema in the Mountains) in Salento, Colombia.

I will have the honour of delivering a series of filmmaking workshops for local emerging filmmakers we will explore how to capture the love and care of those who seek to protect the flora and fauna of the Andes. It is home to 250 species of birds including hummingbird, yellow-eared parrot, Blue-crowned motmot and Andean condor and we will head into the rainforest and film the hummingbirds and the conservationists who work hard to protect them.

Cine en las Montañas Festival is in its 11th year and boasts an incredible programme of documentary films, workshops and masterclasses.

I can't wait to share my journey of the furthest journey this film and movement of love has made so far! I can’t wait to hear what audiences in Salento connect with in this story which has so very Bristol yet shares universal themes of love and connection to rivers. 

Rave On for the Avon is an independent wild swimming documentary that’s explores a community’s fight to save their beloved river in unique, daring & distinctly Bristol ways.