Local Knowledge

‘David Rimmer’s new film is a sombre and celebratory meditation on time and place. Its title, Local Knowledge, is marine terminology for what a skipper must know when navigating dangerous waters. Rimmer is an experienced sailor and the film’s spiritual and geographical centre is aptly-named Storm Bay, where he spends his summers. But it’s a troubled site. The camera, moving with tide and swell, seems to strain anxiously at its anchor and it becomes clear that from here on, nothing will ever be at rest. Local knowledge won’t save anyone anymore. Rimmer’s film shatters the comforting dualities of nature/culture, public/private, home/away, time/space. Yet in place of easy references to apocalypse, the film suggests a simultaneously wondrous and dangerous world in flux. This is a mature work, pulling all of history through a moment, linking one’s own sacred ground with distant fields of blood and joy. Playing with the unforgiving shifts between return and recurrence, Rimmer has fashioned a compelling new vocabulary of processed local and found images and, as a result of a remarkable collaboration with composer Dennis Burke the film has become a work of philosophical intensity. Local Knowledge embraces the human chaos around us without bitterness or finger-wagging. It is a relentless voyage into the present, a territory too little inhabited.’ – Colin Browne.