To The Water

To The Water was inspired by a childhood love of Irish mythology and a current love of poetry. The name To The Water is taken from a line in the poem “The Stolen Child” by Irish poet W. B. Yeats. The poem tells of a fairy taking a child away “to the waters and the wild” to protect him from the sadness and grief of the human world.

To The Water interprets this grief as a mother’s loss of her son. She struggles with this grief throughout the film, until she is finally able to let go and her son can live in the land of the fairies, free from the sadness she feels in the human world.

While fairies aren’t explicitly featured in the film, as I aimed for a more grounded story, they can still be found hidden in my location choices. The tree in the middle of the road, which features prominently in the film, was a favourite landmark of mine as a child, as I believed it was home to fairies. This “fairy tree” was the basis for my script, and I pulled on this location for inspiration to tell this story of grief wrapped in hints of Irish mythology and literature.