Upstream (2019)

Made over the course of three years and six challenging expeditions, Upstream is filmed entirely from the air and follows the upper course of the River Dee in Scotland, from its floodplains near Braemar back to its source on the summit plateau of the Cairngorm mountains -- the highest spring-site of any river in Britain. Billed as a 'dream-flight into wildness and winter', Upstream combines music, image and word to mesmerising effect. Images and field-sounds recorded along the Dee's course by the filmmaker Rob Petit are woven together with both a prose-poem written for the film by Macfarlane (voiced in English and Gaelic by the singer Julie Fowlis and the poet Niall Gordan), and an original score by the composer Hauschka. Eerie, hypnotic and experimental, this ground-breaking film takes as its epigraph the words of the Scottish writer Nan Shepherd (1893-1981), who in The Living Mountain recounts her time spent walking in the Cairngorms and following the Dee to its source on the plateau. "One cannot know the rivers till one has seen them at their sources", wrote Shepherd, "but this journey to sources is not to be undertaken lightly."