Reviews
"Water connects us in both the good times and the bad. The draw is real - and the shared communities that water helps to create are unlike any other in our lives. The Water Rats is a film about dissent, warmth, and human connection that provokes thought and curiosity." Catherine Kelly, Senior Lecturer, Centre for Environment and Society, University of Brighton, Author, Blue Spaces: How and Why Water Can Make You Feel Better
"The Water Rats is a lovely film that truly embraces the remarkable and spiritual experience of swimming. This is a powerful story of human connection with nature, animals, and one another." Elizabeth Nagle, Associate Professor of Health and Human Development, University of Pittsburgh
"The Water Rats beautifully captures something every open-water swimmer knows: both the challenge of making yourself enter cold water and the magic of those moments when it is just you and the water. Sharing that experience breaks down the usual barriers between people, creating unexpected friendships and a community in which everyone looks out for one another. Through striking images of London's hidden natural spaces, the film reminds us that even in the middle of a major city, nature can offer freedom, connection, and a much-needed escape." Tobie-Lynn Smith, world-class swimmer, Associate Professor of Clinical Family Medicine, Georgetown University
"For something as heart-warming as The Water Rats to emerge from something as soul-chilling as a global pandemic is welcome inspiration. Watching this cross-section of people find unlikely communion with each other in a frigid pond makes you believe that maybe we humans can actually escape our ruts and get things right." Alan Weisman, Author, Hope Dies Last: Visionary People Across the World, Fighting to Find Us a Future and The World Without Us
"A tonic for the soul...A piece created with deep poignancy and sophisticated levity...The Water Rats is a project produced on a whim and a minuscule budget but one that bears important testimony to how a pandemic touched us and made us rethink our humanity." Robyn Sassen, The Arts at Large
"An exquisitely rendered film - aesthetically beautiful, visually seductive and layered with compelling narratives. It is a film about the personal...It is a film which is fiercely and passionately grounded in the beauty of the landscape and the transformative power of swimming to allow for submersion and release - with foxes and swans as voyeurs." Robyn Cohen, The Cape Robyn
"Cold water and naked strangers not your thing? Dive into The Water Rats, an invigorating ode to the timeless joy and feel-good fellowship of swimming, no matter the season or the company. Like the magical world it captures, this film is enchanting." Lynn Sherr, Author, SWIM: Why We Love the Water
"The Water Rats demonstrates that our social lives are always entangled with the environmental in ways that are complex, contested, and intimate. The natural environment can be a place of recreation and refuge in times of crisis, but it also shapes how we understand ourselves, share our time with each other, respond to change, and make sense of the world around us." Samuel Clevenger, Assistant Professor of Kinesiology, Towson University
"The Water Rats provides interesting insight into how a diverse group of people came together through a pandemic to engage in a proactive wellbeing activity. I liked the fact that the group was formed organically and that there were a range of benefits. The work closely aligns with my own research on open water swimming. The value of exercise enhanced through a nature-based setting is clear, as is the wellbeing impact of the social connection." James Beale, Senior Lecturer of Sport Psychology, University of East London
"This is a beautiful account of the rich offerings of wild swimming. The film is also so much more - it speaks to the global groundswell of watery work - activists, artists, and scholars who are 'thinking with water' for social and environmental justice. Many of the themes currently surfacing in the scholarly literature, across disciplines, are echoed, so poignantly, through the embodied, affective and relational stories that the 'Water Rats' share. We see them share the hopeful affordances of wild swimming together: not only the personal and political possibilities for well-being, care, solidarity and shared vision across political and social identity difference; but also the powerful attunement to more-than-human species and the planet that this collective practice offers." Tamara Shefer, Professor of Women's and Gender Studies, Chair in Blue Humanities and Gender Justice, University of the Western Cape
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