About the Film

Glitches in the Stream is a young writers documentary film made in collaboration with New Writing North’s Cuckoo Young Writers programme and poet John Challis. Written, filmed and recorded over two days, the project turns a stretch of the River Ouseburn into the subject of a small collection of poems, then follows those poems back out into the place that inspired them. Cuckoo Young Writers exists to give writers early support and a genuine platform, and this project was built around that same idea, treating the group’s own words as the material worth filming rather than a backdrop for something else.

Two Days on the River

John worked with the group first, helping them write and record poems that responded directly to the river, its history and its present state. Rather than treating the writing and the filming as separate stages, the whole project stayed close to that two day window, so the poems and the footage grew out of the same short, intensive period of attention to one stretch of water.

Finding Ouseburn

Once the poems existed, the next job was finding the actual places they were pointing to. I took the group out along the Ouseburn to scout locations together, matching specific lines and images in the poems to real corners of the river rather than choosing pretty backdrops and fitting words to them afterwards. That order, poems first, locations second, shaped the whole look of the film. The Ouseburn itself is a strange, layered stretch of water, part industrial history and part overgrown wildness, which gave the writers plenty of concrete detail to draw on rather than having to invent a landscape from scratch.

A Film Poem, Not a Documentary

Glitches in the Stream sits closer to a film poem than a conventional documentary, built around verse and image rather than interviews or narration. That distinction mattered for a young writers documentary film like this one, since it let the poetry itself carry the meaning, with the camera following the words rather than explaining them. There is no voiceover setting up the river’s history or the writers’ background, just the poems read over footage of the places they describe, trusting the audience to make the connections themselves.

Editing Together

The edit was done together with the group rather than handed back to them as a finished piece, which meant decisions about pacing, ordering and which images sat against which lines were shared rather than made alone in an edit suite. That collaborative editing process is part of what makes the finished film feel like the writers’ own work rather than a film made about them, and it is a working method I still use whenever a project centres on someone else’s writing rather than my own.

Premiere at Juice Festival

Glitches in the Stream premiered at Live Theatre as part of Juice Festival, New Writing North’s festival for new writing and performance in the North East. Seeing the film on a cinema screen, in front of an audience, gave the two days of writing and filming a proper sense of occasion and closure, and turned what had started as a fairly quick, informal project into something with a real public life beyond the river itself.

Why This Project Matters

This is a small, quick project by the standards of most of my work, but it’s stayed with me because of how directly the writing shaped the filming rather than the other way round. A young writers documentary film like this only really works if the film gets out of the way of the poems, and Glitches in the Stream is one of the clearest examples I have of trying to do exactly that.