Russell Tovey

Good afternoon, good morning, good evening, wherever you are in the world.

I am Robert Diamant and you're listening to Talk Art.

Welcome to Talk Art.

Now today I am meditating on a thought which is one of art being activism and I've been thinking a lot lately about the power of film in particular and how often we think of film as entertainment or you know like

Hollywood or going to the cinema, all that kind of stuff.

But I actually connect with film.

Well, I have been connecting with film over the last few years in a kind of different way.

Like obviously I've just interviewed Sir Isaac Julian and I was thinking about exhibition making and creating film as activism in terms of an art context.

But there's a film that I saw a few years ago, which was produced and directed by today's guest, Nothing Compares, which was the biography of Sinead O'Connor, who was such an incredible artist.

And it was actually the film that made me realize her artistry beyond just the music and really how music works.

was a means to her to tell her story and to kind of highlight the plight of others through an artistic platform.

But I feel like she could have actually been a painter or she could have been a writer or, you know, it didn't really matter necessarily the medium that she chose.

It was really about what she had to say.

And I feel like that about today's guest, because I feel like she has been making a

such fascinating films and each time they're very, very different.

So I was initially introduced to her work through the amazing mutual friend we have called Emma Reeves.

Emma has worked in the photography world for a long time and was also at Rolling Stone and was actually part of that incredible Collier Shore shoot with Kristen Stewart that we talked about at depth recently in Collier's episode on this same season.

So if you're listening to this now, go and check that out too.

Emma's an extraordinary person who sort of brings people together.

And when I was moving to Margate, she told me about today's guest's film, Taking the Water, which was just the most amazing, again, documentary about women and a community of people who were using natural swimming, kind of swimming in open water in the sea as a kind of healing space.