Manchester artists to make film celebrating rain – and you are invited to contribute

Rain. It’s one of the things Manchester is famous for. There are few places in the country more likely to more preoccupied with it.

We get more than our fair share of it.  Most of us can’t stand it. But we couldn’t live without it.

It can also be the inspiration for some fantastic images.

Now a group of local rain enthusiasts are creating a film which will celebrate it, how we react to it and how it changes our lives.

Homage to the Rain is a new film by Manchester filmmaker Antony Barkworth-Knight, local musicians Rob Turner, Sam Healey, and Conor Miller and digital strategist Rebecca Rae-Evans, which will have its world premiere at the Lightwaves festival at Salford Quays on Friday December 6th – and they want you to help them make it.

“We are reaching out to people all over the world to send in their videos shot on a mobile phone of rain,” explains Rebecca, who has a long history of using social media to bring people and content together.

“Through the prism of the phenomena of rainfall we will see how people are living around the world in 2019. What are our homes like? What environments do we live in? Our clothes, our culture, our surrounding landscape, our way of life. How is this transformed when it rains?”

When all the content has been collected, the artists will work together to create an immersive audio visual piece that looks at atmosphere and themes found in these global videos of the rain.

After the Lightwaves world premiere, the film will be released globally online and an edition will be kept at the University of Salford Art Collection.

The project is co-commissioned by Quays Culture and University of Salford Art Collection.

To take part in Homage to the Rain, please email [email protected]. For examples of content, please visit the Quays Culture website,Twitter, Instagram or join the Facebook group.

There’s no excuse not to take part – October is one of the wettest months of the year in Manchester.