About the film

This film by digital filmmaker Fotis Begklis was commissioned by Kinetika and Essex Cultural Diversity Project for Beach of Dreams.

Fotis created a cinematic poem, created of asides and digressions that form a portrait of the physicality and human effort of the long coastal path journey where multiple voices, geography and imagination met.

The film collects images and offers up memories of the journey for those who weren’t there; the camera, an outsider to the journey and the places it witnessed, evokes a sense of purpose and belonging.

About the Artist

Fotis Begklis is a filmmaker, researcher and educator, who has worked across commercial and independent film projects for many years and teaches at the University of the Arts London.

His last poetic documentary, Grand Tour, was premiered at the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival in June 2021 and was selected to be part of the Acropolis Remix | Embraces: Utopian Proximities 2021 exhibition.

Learn more about Fotis Beglis here.

Beach of Dreams builds on the success of Kinetika’s Silk River which worked with ten communities along the Thames and linked them and their artistic response through a continuous ten-day 142mile journey on foot. Kevin Rushby joined us and wrote a daily blog. On the day that we walked from Tilbury to East Tilbury, he encountered the glittering foreshore on the Thames Estuary and named it The Beach of Broken Dreams.

“Three years ago, near Tilbury, I experienced something profound. In the bleakest setting, on a grey flat day, with a muddy tide sucking on a scraggy shoreline, I came across a beach filled with marvels and treasure. It was the place where London had dumped its Blitz debris on top of a Victorian tip which was itself on top

of a Georgian dump, and so on back to the Romans. I was totally unprepared for. No one had warned me. I’d strayed from the path and was watching my feet when I began to zigzag between the strange objects that were sticking out from the shingle and sand.

Gently extracting a complete 19th century glass bottle from under a broken WWII wireless set and a vicious thistle, I reflected that you just never know where joy and salvation are coming from. Beauty and hope can crop up in the unlikeliest of places.

Now in this time of restriction and stasis, at a time when the countryside has offered itself up for rediscovery, I feel like I want to walk, and walk far, finding more beaches like that one near Tilbury. It feels like an opportunity that needs to be grasped.

The beach is always the place where human life is exposed, with all its frailties, ambitions and dreams. Voyages begin and end here. Clothes are removed to expose the hard-won six-pack, or the beer belly. Novels are started and finally finished.

Children and dogs have fun, but sometimes, tragically, drown. On beaches we find sublime panoramas, but also all the rubbish that we had thrown away and hoped never to see again. With a brutal disregard for human sensitivities, the sands bear witness to our mistakes:  the dead dolphin in a broken fishing net, the empty container with the skull and crossbones sticker, and the stricken seabirds marinated in crude oil – all things I have encountered on the British coast.

And somewhere high up in the dunes among the rare orchids and butterflies, there is often a wavy line of dried seaweed, like a hastily scribbled message from the sea, warning us of even higher tides to come.”

From Kevin Rushby’s Silk River blog