Exclusive Interview: Cat White On Her Stunning Documentary ‘Swim Sistas’

We spoke to Cat White about her latest documentary short, Swim Sistas. In our interview for the 11th Femme Filmmakers Festival, Cat discusses bringing four generations of swim sistas together, the challenges of filming in water, what this documentary means to her and her subjects, and much more. Read our interview with Cat White below.

Hi Cat, here at Filmotomy and Femme Filmmakers Festival we really love and appreciate your latest work, Swim Sistas. Thank you for joining us today. Different generations of black women are represented in Swim Sistas. How did you come up with the original concept behind your documentary?

Thank you! I love this festival so much, it’s a complete joy to be screening Swim Sistas with you. So the original concept actually came from a very personal place. I loved swimming as a child and even swam competitively as a teen. But I stopped in my late teens and didn’t go back to it until 2021 in a period of profound grief. Overwhelmed, I began swimming in a freezing lake at dawn and slowly found my way back to myself.

I made a narrative short called Fifty-Four Days (2022) and along the way I also discovered a remarkable community of Black women. Swim Sistas grew from my desire to celebrate them and to ask a simple question: what might happen if more Black women and girls felt that the water belonged to them?

What conversations did you have with Alice Dearing, Jasmine Boatswain, Lexie Sandiford, and Roni Bruno when approaching them about your very special and endearing project?

The way of bringing all four of our Swim Sistas onto the project was so special! I had always found Alice Dearing hugely inspiring and first met her whilst she was preparing for the Olympics and knew she had to be a part of this. Jasmine Boatswain is a childhood friend. Whether through rugby or her time on BBC’s The Traitors she has always been pushing boundaries. Lexie Sandiford came through social media and swimming-community outreach. I fell in love with her story of looking up to Alice as her biggest role model.

There was something really beautiful about placing those two generations of swimmers in the same film. And Roni Bruno came into my life almost by accident! She worked with my sister at the time she was learning to swim, and I had just made my short Fifty-Four Days. By chance, Roni told my sister that she was desperate to see the film. My sister said, “That’s my sister’s film!” and connected us. The rest is history.

The legendary Naomie Harris lends her voice as the narrator. Can you talk us through the process of onboarding Naomie Harris?

I know! Such a pinch-me moment. I have always loved Naomie’s work. As I began to work through the edit I knew I wanted to create a thread that could carry the intimacy of the women’s stories and the almost mythological quality of our relationship with water. That led me to create the voice of Mami Wata, an ancestral presence within the film, voiced across three generations.

Naomie immediately felt like the perfect anchor for that voice. I wanted the narration to feel almost like an invitation. Like someone was taking you by the hand and guiding you into the water. Then I simply wrote a letter to her agent explaining the project and why I would love her to be part of it and one of our wonderful executive producers, Afua Hirsch, also backed the approach. I was absolutely thrilled when she came on board.

Cat White: There’s so much history weaved into the documentary alongside the women’s stories. What did the research stage involve and how did you succinctly fit so much history and emotion within the 11-minute runtime?

For me, the challenge was never to try to tell the entire history of Black people and water in eleven minutes. That would be impossible. Instead, I knew I wanted to tell a story of four women, and I wanted there to be a focus on joy. That’s where the idea of Mami Wata became so important.

Rather than explaining every piece of history through exposition, I could acknowledge where we have come from but ‘write’ a more hopeful future into existence. The documentary therefore moves between the very contemporary experiences of these women and something much older and more elemental. The water becomes a kind of bridge between those things.

Swim Sistas is very poetic. I really liked how you integrated your own story into this documentary too through your own monologue. It’s clear so much love and energy went into this project. What was the planning stage like from researching history to writing your monologue, and giving a safe space for your subjects to talk about their own experiences?

The most important thing was that I didn’t want to impose anything onto the women. I wanted to create the conditions for them to tell us what water meant to them (which is both scary and exciting as it really could have gone in any direction!). Because the film came from my own experience, I was very conscious of the responsibility that came with asking other women to share something so personal. We spent time building trust and making sure they understood what the film was trying to do. But also that they had agency over their own stories.

I had an amazing Mental Health & Wellbeing Coordinator on set. Visually and structurally I wanted to create something that felt closer to memory than a traditional talking-head documentary. My own monologue / the voice of Mami Wata became another thread within that tapestry rather than the definitive voice of the film. And I think that’s why poetry felt so natural. Water has always felt like poetry to me. When you’re underwater, everything changes: sound, light, gravity. You move through the world differently. I wanted the filmmaking language to reflect that.

What were the main challenges behind filming the majority of Swim Sistas in the water?

The obvious answer is that it was freezing! We shot the film in March in an icy-cold lake, and we had just one day to capture everything. But water is also wonderfully unpredictable. You can’t completely control it. Light changes, weather changes, bodies move differently in water, even sound behaves differently! Rather than fighting that, I just tried to embrace it. I had my speaker, playing music and keeping the vibes up. We had cars parked nearby and lots of hot water bottles. We also had Dryrobes for the cast and crew (thank you Dryrobe!) And hot drinks on deck thanks to our amazing location Penshurst Place & Gardens.

Cat White: I’ve noticed your filmography has a theme of water. From Farewell She Goes (2021) to Fifty-Four Days (2022) which was showcased at the 10^th Femme Filmmakers Festival, and Swim Sistas (2025). What does the water mean to you?

Very observant! You’re absolutely right. And my debut feature, Black Samphire, will look at water pollution through a folk horror lens! Where to begin. I think I’m still trying to answer that question. Water has become a recurring language in my work because it represents so many things to me at once: freedom, memory, courage, grief, joy, peace and hope. When I first returned to swimming during a period of grief, I wasn’t consciously thinking about why. I was simply trying to survive something.

But I found that the water gave me a space where I could be still and completely present. There is something about being underwater where the rules of the world temporarily change. Even time feels different. I think I became fascinated by that feeling, and filmmaking became a way of trying to recreate it for other people.

Was there anything surprising that you learnt whilst listening to your subjects’ stories? Was there a moment where you paused and were taken aback by their emotional experiences? Or a moment where you felt their stories were empathetic and relatable to your own journey?

One of the things that stayed with me most was how differently the women had come to the water, despite sharing an identity as Black women. Alice had reached the highest level of competitive swimming, Lexie was coming through as a young athlete, Jasmine had found water through sport and movement, while Roni was learning to swim for the first time in her fifties. Roni’s story particularly stayed with me.

As a child, she had been told that because she was Black, her bones were “too heavy” for her to swim. Hearing something like that and understanding how a statement made to a child can live in the body for decades was incredibly powerful. And I guess what moved me most was watching her begin to unlearn that story. I think that is what the film became about for me: not simply swimming but reclaiming the stories we have been told about who we are and what spaces belong to us.

What was the experience like for the women involved in Swim Sistas? For Jasmine, Roni, Alice, and Lexi – did you notice a profound change in pre-production to post-production in how they viewed their own experiences after talking to and relating to each other?

What was beautiful was watching the women begin to see their individual experiences as part of something larger. They weren’t all swimming for the same reason, but there was a recognition between them. I was especially moved by the relationship between Alice and Lexie. Lexie spoke about Alice as someone she looked up to, and Alice was able to see in Lexie a future generation of Black swimmers. That intergenerational exchange is one of the reasons the film feels hopeful to me.

Jasmine provided such a sense of inspiration, her one liners are always just goosebump moments for me. And then Roni represented another kind of possibility: that it is never too late to begin again. She swam in open water for the first time on our shoot day! And now she has done her 500m. Her story has inspired so many people to begin to learn to swim. And the response the film has had hopefully is inspiring to each of our swim sistas.

Cat White: What do you hope your audience takes away from Swim Sistas? If there was one important message you would like them to leave with?

I hope people leave feeling that the water belongs to them too. For Black women and girls in particular, I want the film to challenge the idea that swimming, open water or outdoor spaces are somehow not for us. But I also don’t want the film to be about fear or statistics alone as ultimately it is about community, and it is about joy.

Since the film began travelling, we’ve had women tell us that they signed up for swimming lessons, joined swimming groups or returned to the water after seeing Swim Sistas. We’ve had young girls tell us that they saw themselves on screen. That is SO incredibly meaningful to me.

Ultimately, I hope the film makes people want to take the plunge (literally and metaphorically!). To reconnect with their bodies, with nature, with community and perhaps with a part of themselves they thought they’d lost or never thought they would experience. I think we can forget that sometimes reclaiming a space is simply about allowing yourself to believe that you were always allowed to be there.

Thanks Cat! Swim Sistas by Cat White is part of Filmotomy’s coverage on the Femme Filmmakers Festival 2026.

You can read our review of Swim Sistas by Cat White here.