MACT's Dr Sarah Gibson Yates releases new short film

Senior Lecturer Dr Sarah Gibson Yates has created a new short film, Flow States, in response to a commission from the 2025 Cambridge Rivers of Film Festival.

The eight-minute film explores the ways humans are entangled with water through memory, duration and bodies. The film combines images and audio collected in and around the River Granta, where Dr Gibson Yates grew up, with audio and autoethnographic archive video, in which she reflects on her connection to water.

Actively shaping the work are the ideas of hydro feminist scholar and ecology activist Astrida Neimanis, whose work repositions the anthropogenic subject as part of a water-driven ecosystem in response to a wider moment of climate crisis (Neimanis, 2026).

Flow States invites audiences to embrace an intimacy with water, one mediated through the technologies of camera and hydrophone. Through the processes of working with the audio and visual material for this film, Dr Gibson Yates moves toward a deeper understanding of her connection to water. Viewing the relational connection formed between the film subject and filmmaker in the process of making-becoming, she recognises herself somewhere between Braidotti’s nomadic subject, where she finds herself in a process of becoming water, and Vietnamese filmmakers' notion of speaking nearby.

Embracing the unstable ontologies of both filmmaker and subject, Flow States activates and transforms how both filmmaker and audience think/respond/act to the urgent needs of our environment, seeking ways to overcome inertia, nostalgia, aporia, and other forms of stasis brought about by our historical condition (Braidotti, 2011, 2014).

You can watch a three-minute opening extract of Flow States via Vimeo, with the full version of the film due to be published to the platform in the near future. In the meantime, you can request the full version by emailing [email protected]