Dream-flight

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 Gòrdan), 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."

Making Upstream

The River Dee begins on the Cairngorm Plateau, just beneath the summit of Braeriach, Britain’s third highest mountain.

In early 2016 the filmmakers began following its course upriver. It would take another three years and six expeditions to complete the film. The filmmakers faced numerous challenges during the making of the film including disorientating blizzards, failing technology, expedition-ending injuries, lost maps, and winds so strong they made filming and even walking impossible. Only on the fourth expedition was the filming team able to make it to the source of the river in midwinter, where they camped overnight in thigh-deep snow.

Robert Macfarlane: “The Cairngorm Mountains are Britain’s Arctic. In winter, storm- winds of up to 170 miles per hour rasp the range, and avalanches scour its slopes. Born of fire, carved by ice, finessed by wind, water and snow, the Cairngorm massif is a terrain shaped by the elementals. It is a landscape far more kindred with upland regions of Iceland, Norway and Greenland than it is with the green fields of England.”

Rent or Purchase Upstream Online (VOD)

Reviews

“Stunning… majestic… a timely reminder of Britain’s natural beauty amid the climate crisis.” - The Guardian.

“Entrancing…” - The Daily Telegraph.

“Upstream, a new half-hour television film written by Robert Macfarlane and directed by Rob Petit, puts the viewer in the realm of that very different perception of time… I was going to describe the film’s beauty as unearthly; that, however, would be the very opposite of what I mean. Yes, Upstream brings us closer to a sense of the eternal, but its gaze is fixed on the ground beneath our feet.” - Richard Williams, The Blue Moment.

“Mesmerising…” - Tim Robey, Film Critic.

“A poignant pilgrimage to loss and being lost… truly extraordinary audio that befits a truly extraordinary project.” - The Daily Telegraph (review of The Frozen River).

“With poems, a sprinkling of prepared piano, sound effects, and slabs of synth, Upstream is a living and breathing wonder… The sound of the river can also be heard in the background, making it an essential voice of the record. In fact, throughout its duration, two voices speak at once: both the river’s voice and a human one.” - Fluid Radio (review of ‘Upstream’, the album).