The Writing in the Sand (1991)

• 82%
• 1991
• Documentary
• History

Constructed entirely from black & white photographs, the film evokes the magic of an urban family's day out on the windswept beaches of north East England. It is packed with action, invention and surprise: bodiless heads sticking out of the sand; teenagers jumping in the sea fully clothed; family picnicking under a blanket. Memory and fantasy intermingle with expressions of intoxicating freedom and quizzical encounters with nature. When a forewarning is ignored, a sunny daydream turns unexpectedly into a nightmare. The sea breaks into an awesome display of fury and pain, and a strange metamorphosis takes place on the shore. Whilst celebrating the child in each of us, the film is a timely and powerful reminder of our interdependence with the natural world. Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen began to photograph on the North Eastern coast on her arrival in Newcastle in the late 1960s. Initially attracted to the extraordinary abandon with which the Northern people take to the freedom offered by their beaches, she later focused on the natural elements and transformations of the beaches as live drama in their own right. The resulting book Writing in the Sand, published in 2000, was a culmination of twenty five years of inspired photography. An unprecedented experiment, Amber's film The Writing in the Sand is also a mammoth labour of love by its creative team. The film's 400 photographs, taken by Sirkka-Liisa over 17 years, were shot with free camera movements and married to a complex soundtrack of beach recordings, music and poetry. The result is a stirring cinematic experience.