Mona, the River is a film about healing, time, and our connection to the earth.

It begins with a trip into the countryside. Finding his dreams beset with strange premonitions of a river, trainee accountant Alex decides to make the trip into the country to try and find it. The hike was tougher than he anticipated, so he finds himself hitching a ride with a young woman named Mary. They talk a little, and then fall to silence.

Mary herself is staying in the countryside with her partner Bella. Bella is ill, near-bedridden, and though this is not revealed in the course of the film, she is pregnant. She spends her days sleeping, or not going far from the homely barn in which they live.

Indeed, Alex discovers his river - but this is just the beginning of a long summer…

Mona, the River is, speaking essentially, a small production. We are not intending to let this force us to create a small film. Our partnership with Bristol Production Van has allowed for significant reductions in equipment costs, leaving our finances as follows:

With Mona, I really only hope to make it the most honest version of itself possible. Whether or not that version has a good soul might not even be up to me. Approaching draft ten now, the process has come to be about this: cutting away, getting to the root, to that soul, and not to judge it, but just to express it. And it’s been a long process. I first had the idea for the film simply titled “Mona” in September 2022. It was a very different film, a relaxed, romanticised hang-out in a Tuscan town, following the adventures of a young girl called, sure enough, Mona.

In August of 2023, Mona disappeared from the story, as if through a back door of which I had no knowledge. No matter how I looked at it, she could not reappear. Her father, Alex, had been left to piece together her glaring absence, yet he too was unaware of her; threaded across a narrative closer to Mulholland Drive than Dazed and Confused. It was about this time that I began writing a short film, the first title of which (at least, I think) was “Late September”. It followed a young man who, unable to sleep, ends up on an excursion into the country with two women who he hardly knows. You’re probably able to do the rest of the work from here…

In January this year, feeling beaten by what “Late September” had become (I think, without any joke, that it was called “In April and in June” by this point), I decided to title the film “Mona”, in a desperate attempt to impart some of the magic I felt that that idea had into my flailing, stalling script. It worked. Ten drafts later, Mona has gone somewhere I didn’t think it would. But if I did know where it was going, if I did know what it was going to tell me, if I was going to tap out the words just as I imagined them and regurgitate the world just as I imagined it - then, why would I write it at all?

I have faith in Mona. I hope you might, too, and if I’m saying anything I’m saying that it’s been a long time in the womb. It’s about time for birth.