The Gold Fish

The Gold Fish, or Straight Flushes for the Manifestly Destined:  The Film

A musical tour of water politics and salmon migration.

We’re currently in production! Check out photos from the shoot. And visit our Indie GoGo campaign if you’d like to support our work.

Directed by Sarolta Cump.

Written by July Oskar Cole.

Starring Annie Danger, J. Dellecave, Stormy Knight, and K. Qilo Matzen, and Ivy Jeanne McClelland.

Follow the plucky Salmon, Ms. Coho, in her struggle to get upstream to spawn. At the Gold Fish Water Casino she must gamble her eggs for river passage. She encounters a Water Nymph dealing dirty cards, an ancient Crocodile stuck playing host to the casino’s vaudeville numbers, the bumbling Army Chorus of Engineers, and an array of displaced River Creatures.

As a storm brews in the distance, the Water Tycoon shuffles in for a cataclysmic show down. Will the Water Nymph confront its PTSD from the Water Wars? Will the River at last become a Waterfall? Will the Salmon and her newfound allies rise up, or will it all go down the drain?

The Gold Fish will be shot in HD and run 30 minutes, following a three act structure. Rife with double entendre and stunning visuals, the Gold Fish engages the audience with the politics of water and dam removal using memorable characters, camp humor and show tunes.

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ORIGINS

The Gold Fish originated as a three person, one act play that Juy Cole wrote while on tour with the book Dam Nation in 2007. In October 2011, the Water CA media book project invited ‘The Gold Fish’ to be performed at the Crocker Museum in Sacramento, and Cole expanded the piece into a three-act musical. Cole and collaborator Cleo Woelfle-Erskine enlisted filmmaker Sarolta Jane Cump to direct the play and adapt it into a film. This January, The Gold Fish accepted an invitation from the Wild & Scenic Film Festival to perform at their Dam Removal Event .

All participants are members of The Water Underground, a loose and variously membered cadre of artists, scientists, and water activists who share the revolutionary hope for water to rise. We position ourselves not within the static preordained water infrastructure contemporary society takes for granted– but as part of a living, shifting nexus of natural, technological, social, and spiritual forces.