Synopsis 

Ninfa Fluida is an experimental documentary film about the Rotte river, a major but discrete landmark of the city of Rotterdam. Starting from its biotic and mythical components, the film renders the river away from its residential routines and leisure practices. Through a form of filmic re-enchantment, the piece tries to distance us from an overly rational vision that would hold water as intelligible, manageable and abstract. The film is constructed from a diversity of materials that were meticulously recorded in the Rotte ecosystem and Rotterdam city archives. But it is up to the audience to reimagine the river from the mingling of freshwater organisms with underwater sounds and 18th century Dutch river poetry. The jawless leech, the flatworm and the verses of poet Dirk Smits ultimately coalesce into a portrait of the river that questions more than it fixes. 

 In a time of ecological disaster and biodiversity loss, new relational systems need to be shaped. We need to change the ways we imagine, conceive and inhabit the world. With its assumed profusion of forms and confusion of meanings, the film aims to raise questions about the impacts of human practices on ecosystems and biodiversity, but also on the way humans think, imagine and make sense of water. Hopeful,  Ninfa Fluida is essentially a multisensory ode to the primordial interconnectedness of water and imagination.