Film 2 : Backstroke

‘Backstroke’ grows out of one image – a photo of my lover steaming through an idyllic swimming pool at a friends’ house in France. It’s one of those magical photos that captures a moment of deep happiness in a life, and the poem reflects that. The film pans over the image very slowly, only arriving near the end to the woman at the centre of it all. The film and the poem are also about the sensation of swimming, so it’s appropriate that YouTube surrounds it with films of swimming races. The Corelli brilliantly melds the reading, the spray flying through the light and the deep swimming-pool blue.