Saltwater Breath is a Finalist at the MY HERO International Film Festival

Set along the Cornish coast, Saltwater Breath is an experimental documentary following Out of Sink, a collective of women who use synchronised swimming as a form of environmental activism.

Based in Penzance, the group brings together eight women, mostly in their 40s to 60s, who describe themselves as "more enthusiastic than expert". Their performances combine movement, creativity and a love of the sea to raise awareness of climate change, marine pollution and fossil fuel expansion.

In the film, the women prepare for a synchronised swimming performance at the August 2025 protest against the proposed Rosebank oil field. Through breath, immersion and choreographed movement, they use their bodies to make a statement about protecting the ocean.

Shot on 16mm film, with some footage hand-processed using seawater, Saltwater Breath brings its filmmaking process into its environmental message. The result is a poetic reflection on community, creativity and our relationship with the natural world.

Watch the film here: 

About the Filmmaker

Nahlia Loren-Couto is a documentary filmmaker, writer, director and producer, and founder of Earthbeat Studios. Her work explores environmental storytelling, adventure and our connection with the natural world. Her background in creative practice, circular design and education informs her approach to sustainable filmmaking.

Find out more: www.earthbeatstudioinc.com

Interview with Nahlia Loren-Couto

What inspired you to make Saltwater Breath, and how did the idea of a synchronised swim as a form of protest first emerge?

Saltwater Breath is part of a trilogy of sea-told stories exploring our relationship with the natural world through poetry, art, adventure and film.

As a cold-water swimmer, surfer and lifelong outdoor adventurer, so much of my creative inspiration comes directly from being immersed in wild places.

The ocean has also been profoundly healing for me. During COVID, while navigating the loss of my father to cancer and the end of my marriage, I spent time on the Pacific Northwest coastline. There was something about the vastness and rhythm of the water, the feeling of being held by something so much greater than myself, that helped me find my way through grief.

I wanted to share something of that experience with audiences, including those who may never have had the privilege of standing at the edge of an ocean.

During my master's at Falmouth University, my tutor Jane Pugh introduced me to Cornwall's Out of Sink collective. I connected with Natalie Walker, who opened up the possibility of collaborating with the group, including Pippa Best, Bec Applebee and Mary Woodvine.

These women were already using synchronised swimming as a form of joyful environmental activism. And I loved that! Here was a group of women challenging environmental issues through play, laughter, creativity and collective movement.

There was something beautifully subversive about it.

The metaphor was extraordinary. Individual women, each with their own stories, moving together in one body of water, responding to one another and to the ocean itself.

I wanted audiences to feel that connection. To be moved, quite literally and emotionally, and perhaps reconnect with something of their own relationship to the natural world.

Why did you choose the proposed Rosebank oil field as the focus for the film?

Rosebank wasn't a cause I selected and then built a film around. It was already part of the women's environmental activism.

For me, documentary filmmaking begins with listening. There's a responsibility to honour the authenticity of the people who invite you into their stories. The women of Out of Sink were already using their creative voices to protect the sea they loved. Our role wasn't to manufacture a protest, but to collaborate with them and help carry their story to a wider audience.

Rosebank is one of the UK's largest undeveloped oil and gas fields, northwest of Shetland. Its proposed development raises serious questions about carbon emissions, vulnerable marine ecosystems and the continued expansion of fossil fuel production during a climate crisis.

Its original approval was overturned following a legal challenge concerning the assessment of emissions from burning the extracted oil and gas, and the project remains subject to renewed regulatory review.

As a Canadian filmmaker, I find the wider connections particularly striking. Equinor, one of the companies behind Rosebank through its UK joint venture, is also advancing the Bay du Nord offshore oil development off Newfoundland.

Two Atlantic coastlines, connected by the same ocean, corporate interests and many of the same questions about our environmental future.

What begins as a deeply local story about women protecting the sea they know intimately becomes something universal.

And that's what makes their activism so meaningful. It begins with love of place, but the responsibility extends to all of us.

The film combines documentary, performance and environmental art. How did you develop this approach, and what can these different forms of storytelling communicate that a more traditional documentary might not?

I think the way we made Saltwater Breath needed to reflect the very thing the women were exploring: community, interrelationship and the possibility of change through collective expression.

The filmmaking itself became an extension of that philosophy.

We came from wonderfully different creative backgrounds. Tristan Meredith, our editor and sound designer, brought his experience in traditional documentary. I come from environmental art, poetry, design and adventure filmmaking. Guy Potter, our cinematographer, has a deeply personal relationship with the Cornish coastline, where he lives, swims and works as a lifeguard.

And the women brought their extraordinary worlds of performance, music, activism and lived relationships with the sea.

I've always been drawn to poetic and experimental filmmaking, and to artists such as Agnès Varda, who challenged the boundaries of what documentary could be. Cornwall also has a beautiful tradition of artists responding directly to the landscape, and I was interested in the possibility of nature becoming an active participant in the creative process.

We shot on 16mm for its texture, physicality and sense of presence. We also processed some of the footage using seawater collected from the locations. I love that the ocean wasn't simply something we photographed. It physically participated in making the images, leaving its own impression on the film.

We integrated beautiful watercolour artwork by local environmental artist Jasmine Hortop, whose own practice is inspired by the natural world.

And then there was the music. Bec Applebee introduced us to Dalla, whose Cornish folk traditions connect the film to the cultural history of that coastline.

During the filmmaking process, Pippa Best shared a song that had come to her through her relationship with the sea. We discussed recording and including it, and it became our closing offering, We Are the Waves.

For me, those words hold the heart of the story. We are individual, but we're also part of one living ocean, one interconnected body.

Traditional documentary has an incredibly important role in informing audiences and presenting complex issues. But poetry, performance, music and experimental cinema can invite us to experience something before we've necessarily found the words to explain it. They can reach us through feeling, memory and the body.

And I think that's where art becomes transformative.

The film explores ecofeminism and the relationship between art and activism. How did these ideas shape your creative decisions, and can a film change the way people feel about an environmental issue without directly trying to persuade them?

Absolutely. Can you imagine the power of art?

I think art and activism have been inseparable for me for as long as I can remember.

As a teenager, I founded a peace activist society at my high school. When a conservation area in my hometown was threatened by plans for a parking lot, I organised a Christmas protest where we decorated the trees with popcorn and cranberries, wrote poetry and brought the story to CBC.

Looking back, I suppose I was practising environmental art and creative activism long before I understood them as an artistic vocation.

I've been influenced throughout my life by poets like Wordsworth and Mary Oliver, and more recently by Sharon Blackie's beautiful book If Women Rose Rooted. Her exploration of the eco-heroine's journey gave me language for something I'd been feeling and living for years: that we are not separate from the natural world. We belong to it.

I'm also inspired by Irish surfer and marine social scientist Easkey Britton, whose book Saltwater in the Blood explores the ocean as a place of healing, connection and transformation.

I think we're living in a time when so much environmental messaging is framed through fear, catastrophe, loss and scientific data. Those realities are critically important, but I also think there's an exhaustion around climate action. People can feel overwhelmed, disconnected or powerless.

And I wonder whether art can offer another way into that conversation.

What if, rather than beginning with everything we stand to lose, we begin with everything we love?

What if we invite people back into the joy of being alive on this beautiful planet? Into play, wonder, movement, beauty and belonging?

The women of Out of Sink aren't diminishing the seriousness of what they're protesting. They're expressing their resistance through something life-affirming.

And I find that incredibly powerful.

For me, ecofeminism asks a very important question: what happens when we stop seeing the natural world as something to possess, control or extract from, and begin to understand ourselves as part of it?

If we look at Rosebank, we're talking about enormous industrial and political decisions being made about the future of the ocean. And then we have this small group of women on the Cornish coast, entering that same Atlantic with their bodies, their voices and their love for the sea.

The contrast is extraordinary.

These women aren't speaking about the ocean as an abstract environmental resource. They know it intimately. They swim in it, find comfort in it, create art with it. It holds their memories, their histories, their friendships.

Their synchronised swimming is a particularly beautiful expression of this. Each woman brings her individuality, but the performance depends on listening, trust and cooperation. Nobody can dominate the movement. And once they enter the ocean, they have to respond to something much greater than themselves.

The sea is not something they can choreograph or control. They have to move with it.

I think there's something quite profound in that.

As a filmmaker, I don't necessarily want to tell audiences what to think. I want to create an experience that allows them to feel something for themselves.

Because I believe that when we feel deeply connected to something, when we recognise it as part of who we are, care becomes a natural response. And from that care can grow responsibility, stewardship and action.

Art may not solve the climate crisis, but it can open a door.

And perhaps that's where meaningful change begins.

Saltwater Breath has been shortlisted as a finalist at the MY HERO Film Festival. What does this recognition mean to you, and how do you hope the film will reach audiences beyond the festival?

It's an extraordinary honour, particularly because these two awards speak so directly to things that have been central to my life's work: women's creative voices and art as a way of inspiring positive change.

But what moves me most is that this recognition belongs to a community.

The women of Out of Sink were already making a difference long before our cameras arrived. And Guy, Tristan, Jasmine and all the artists who contributed brought something of themselves to this film. It really is a collective expression, and I love that it's being recognised in that spirit.

We've been very intentional about where Saltwater Breath travels and who we hope it reaches.

I never wanted it to exist exclusively within environmental documentary festivals. I wanted it to move between experimental art spaces, outdoor adventure communities, ocean advocacy and places where people are already having meaningful conversations about our relationship with the natural world.

We've recently screened at the Saltwater Surf, Music & Culture Festival in Bundoran, Ireland, and at the Forest City Film Festival in Canada, where the film was presented in the experimental shorts programme at Museum London.

And in November, I'll be returning to the UK for Kendal Mountain Festival, where Saltwater Breath has been selected for its International Film Competition. More than 165 films were selected from over 650 submissions, and we're incredibly honoured to be part of that programme.

We'll be screening as part of the Outdoor Swimming Session at Kendal Town Hall, a gathering of films and speakers exploring people's relationships with rivers, lakes and oceans around the world.

I'm especially excited to be there in person, sharing the story and connecting with swimmers and outdoor communities who understand, in a very visceral way, what these wild places give us.

I'd also love to bring the film back to Cornwall for a community screening, perhaps in collaboration with the National Maritime Museum Cornwall, creating an opportunity for the women of Out of Sink to share their experiences directly with audiences in the place where the story began.

Beyond that, I see opportunities within environmental and climate action weeks, ocean conservation campaigns, universities, schools and community organisations. I'd love for the film to become a starting point for conversations about ecofeminism, creative activism, our relationship with water and the ways art can help us reimagine environmental storytelling.

What excites me most is the possibility of a screening becoming something more.

A conversation. A gathering. An invitation to participate, create something, or protect a place that matters.

Because that's really what the women of Out of Sink have demonstrated. Change doesn't always begin with something enormous. Sometimes it begins with a small community of people coming together around something they love.

Ultimately, I hope someone watching the film, whether they're an ocean swimmer, an artist, a student or someone who has never seen the Atlantic, finds something of their own relationship with nature in it.

And if it leaves them feeling a little more connected, a little more inspired to care, and perhaps to act, then that feels like a meaningful contribution.

We are the waves, after all. And every wave is part of something greater.