Director
Chloe White
Producer
Jodie Taylor
Development support
A town of beloved homes about to disappear into the sea, a coastline rich with fossils slowly being revealed to the sky, and a community bereft, forced to fight for its very survival.
A View from the Edge is a striking meditation on loss and impermanence, through the personal cost of coastal erosion. A mixture of observational documentary, operatic and community vocal performances, and stylised vignettes, the film will be an elegy to one of the UK’s fastest crumbling towns, one crafted in collaboration with its residents.
For the last few years the townspeople of Happisburgh have lived in a state of something suspended—aware that the precious time they have left in the town where many of them grew up is fast slipping away. However, in 2023 the land on which they live began to fall away at an even more terrifying rate. Across the course of a year, this film will capture a portrait of a community fighting for its very survival, as they mount a campaign to try to reverse the council’s decision to leave their town to erode instead of protecting it with sea defenses.
Accompanying this collective story of meetings, protests, rallying and lobbying, will be the storylines of several individuals. These narrative threads will take us deep into the emotional impact of living life on the precipice. For some, this will be their final year in their beloved homes; vessels that have played host to thousands of personal memories, and that have sounds, smells and atmospheres woven deep in their owners’ identities.
Inspired by performance documentaries such as Bombay Beach, the film’s observational scenes will be interspersed with vignettes of performance from our characters and the extended community. These will be vocal and choral performances responding to the landscape and their situation, born of workshops with an award-winning vocal facilitator. These lamenting odes, performed on cliff edges, in ruins of WW2 structures, and in the debris of collapsed houses, will bring a raw, bone-rattling sense of what it feels like to be losing the place you love.
