EP. 1505: Filmmaker Kelly Ann Buckley (MED SELKIES)

Med Selkies, 11min., UK Directed by Kelly Ann Buckley Med Selkies is a poetic film exploring a near-future climate crisis where land is ravaged, and a lone human drifts at sea. Succumbing to the depths, the human encounters an ancestral, aquatic force – beings who once diverged from humanity to adapt to life beneath the waves. https://www.instagram.com/k_a_b_art_n_sound Get to know the filmmaker: What motivated you to make this film? ~ This was an expansion of a project I did for Focal Point Gallery – a wonderful contemporary arts gallery in SouthendonSea, UK. I was lucky enough to be commissioned to create an exhibition for their FPG Sounds programme. My project – Echoes in the Fossils – was a sound-led audiovisual 5 part piece – focused on rising sea levels and lost past & imagined future soundscapes, ranging from Mesolithic to Anthropocene epochs, which touched upon futuristic polymer-human hybrids. Med Selkies was a continuation of that exploration, after Echoes in the Fossils had finished. I am interested in the Aquatic Ape theory and the idea that there may be some human cousin out there in parts of the ocean we don’t know about. Med Selkies evolved from my thinking about that, and what may happen if we are forced to return to the ocean, living with them, because of climate change. This was combined with the thinking about humans carrying micro plastics in their bodies vs the plastic eating microbes scientists are now working with. What if these grow huge, and we become the food? It’s all very mixed up thinking and dreamlike and I suppose this vibe was carried through to the film Subscribe to the podcast: https://twitter.com/wildsoundpod https://www.instagram.com/wildsoundpod/ https://www.facebook.com/wildsoundpod