The Fifth Continent on Film
A community filmmaking scheme rooted in the landscape of the Romney Marsh.
The Fifth Continent on Film
The Fifth Continent on Film is a community filmmaking scheme rooted in the landscape of the Romney Marsh - a place apart, with its own history, its own light, and its own people who know it in ways no outsider quite can. Through a programme of short documentary and creative films, the project gave local communities the tools and opportunity to tell their own stories about the land they live in, uncovering the hidden beauty, heritage, and culture of one of England's most singular landscapes.
Release Date
2019-2022
Type
PUBLIC ART SCHEME
Specifications
COMMUNITY FILM PROGRAMME
Comissioner
KENT WILDLIFE TRUST - HERITAGE LOTTERY FUND
The Fifth Continent on Film is a celebration of the Romney Marsh as a living landscape of accumulated memory, quiet resilience, and belonging. It is an invitation to look again at a place that has always existed slightly apart — reclaimed from the sea, flat and wide and given to a particular quality of light — and to find within it the stories that only the people who live there truly know how to tell.
The Fifth Continent on Film is an inquiry into the relationship between landscape, community, and cultural memory. Commissioned by Kent Wildlife Trust and funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund as part of a wider Landscape Partnership Scheme, the project was created in collaboration with local communities, businesses, and filmmakers across the Romney Marsh — rooted in the conviction that local people are the best custodians of their own place, and that the tools to tell its stories should belong to them.
Standing at the edge of England, the Romney Marsh holds within it centuries of history, ecology, and human life — from the medieval churches that survive in villages contracted around them, to the drainage ditches that trace the slow work of reclamation, to the species that inhabit its fens, shingle, and saltmarsh. Each community, each landscape, each story moves in relation to the others, sustained by a shared sense of place that persists quietly beneath the surface of everyday life.
Participants were invited to develop filmmaking skills and produce short documentary and creative films about the local landscape, heritage, and culture of the Marsh — contributing to a body of 30 films that together form a portrait of a place rediscovered through the eyes of the people who call it home. An annual Film Festival brought communities together to celebrate the work and each other.
The Fifth Continent on Film was funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund and delivered in partnership with Kent Wildlife Trust, local community groups, and businesses across the Romney Marsh. The project was completed by Screen South in 2022.
Local people were invited to develop filmmaking skills and produce short documentary and creative films about the local landscape, heritage, and culture of the Marsh — contributing to a body of 30 films that together form a portrait of a place rediscovered through the eyes of the people who call it home.
