Filming Poets with Purpose: Portrait of the Artist as an Island Flower by Linda France

Filming poets is always a quiet privilege—Portrait of the Artist as an Island Flower is a film poem I made with Linda France.

It reimagines a moment in the life of 19th-century botanical artist Margaret Rebecca Dickinson, who left behind hundreds of exquisite plant portraits, but almost nothing of herself. With no surviving portrait and scant personal record, poet Linda France conjures her spirit through a lyrical response to Dickinson’s 1874 field trip to Holy Island.

The poem, Portrait of the Artist as an Island Flower, was first published in Waves and Bones (NCLA, Newcastle University, 2018) and draws on Linda’s in-depth research into Dickinson’s work as part of her Creative Practice-based PhD Women on the Edge of Landscape. This creative enquiry later became The Knucklebone Floor (Smokestack, 2022), winner of the Laurel Prize, awarded by Simon Armitage for outstanding nature and environmental poetry.

The film reflects on how we remember the forgotten—how we might imagine another’s inner world when so much is lost to time. Dickinson’s watercolours, collected specimens, and the Northumberland landscape serve as a fragile conduit through which Linda explores identity, memory, and the poetics of the overlooked.

Filming poets like Linda France allows for a more reflective and layered approach to documentary work—especially when the poetry itself engages so deeply with place, ecology, and loss. In this case, the North East landscape is not just a backdrop, but a co-author: the salt air, the shifting light, and the distant shape of Lindisfarne all infuse the tone of the film.

This kind of work sits at the heart of my filmmaking practice. Based in Newcastle, I often collaborate with poets, artists, and researchers across the North East to tell stories that feel local but resonate far beyond. Filming poets offers a rare intimacy—where language, sound, and image fold into one another, revealing layers of meaning that live not only in the words, but in the silences between them.

As someone drawn to poetic documentary, Filming Poets feels like a natural extension of my work. There’s a different rhythm involved—less about driving a narrative forward, more about holding a space for reflection. It allows me to experiment with tone, sound, and visual metaphor, often working in ways that feel closer to installation or moving image art than traditional documentary. In this film, I used a stripped-back kit to remain agile and responsive—capturing passing light on stone, fleeting movement in grass, or the slow drift of clouds across the sky.

Working in the North East of England has deeply shaped my approach. The region’s layered histories, open landscapes, and strong creative communities continue to offer inspiration. Whether filming poets, documenting artists, or working alongside researchers and musicians, I try to listen as much as I record. It’s in that act of quiet attention that the real images begin to reveal themselves.

Filming poets also allows me to embrace ambiguity. There’s often no definitive answer or conclusion in these films—just an atmosphere, a question, a thread of feeling. It’s a way of working that suits both my temperament and the kinds of subjects I’m drawn to: overlooked lives, forgotten places, and slow processes that resist simplification.

With Portrait of the Artist as an Island Flower, my aim wasn’t to explain Dickinson’s life but to spend time inside it—or at least beside it—through the lens of Linda’s poem. That collaboration between poet and filmmaker, text and image, past and present, created a kind of resonance. It invited viewers to linger, to wonder, and perhaps to reimagine what it means to be seen through time.

🎞️ About the Filmmaker

Alan Fentiman is a documentary filmmaker based in Newcastle upon Tyne. With over 15 years of experience, he specialises in capturing artists, academics, and heritage stories through a lyrical, observational lens. His work blends the poetic with the factual, often collaborating with creatives across the North East of England.

Filming poets is a recurring part of Alan’s creative practice, offering opportunities to explore language and place in tandem. He has made films for the BBC, Channel 4, The Discovery Channel, and Adobe, as well as leading cultural and academic institutions across the UK. As a North East-based filmmaker, his work is rooted in the stories of this region—stories that often emerge from the quiet resilience of artists, writers, and communities whose voices deserve to be heard.

Linda France was named Environmental Poet of the Year 2022–23 in the Michael Marks Awards. Her selected pamphlet Letters to Katlia is published by the British Library and Wordsworth Grasmere. Her tenth collection, Startling (Faber & New Writing North, 2022), stems from her three-year Writing the Climate residency with New Writing North and Newcastle University.

You can watch Portrait of the Artist as an Island Flower on my artist films page:

👉 https://alanfentiman.co.uk/vimeo-videos/artist-films/

If you’d like to watch more of my work exploring community stories, creative resilience, and diverse subjects across arts, heritage, and the environment, you can explore all my films here:

👉 https://alanfentiman.co.uk/films-by-alan-fentiman/filmmaker Northumberland

🖋️ Poem by: Linda France

📍 Commissioned by: The Maltings for the exhibition Margaret Rebecca Dickinson: A Botanical Artist of the Border Counties, The Granary Gallery, Berwick (22 October 2022 – 19 February 2023)