Playhouse Theatre -- June 4 .

There was a full house of enthusiastic supporters led, naturally enough, by her parents (Sir John and Lady Swan), when Alison Swan's film was premiered in the splendidly renovated Somers Playhouse, at a fund-raising for the Masterworks Foundation on Saturday.

"Still Water,'' written and directed by Ms Swan, is her New York University Graduate Film School half-hour thesis production.

Set in Bermuda, and photographed in gloatingly lush colours which confirm, if any is needed, that the Island is a photographer's dream, Ms Swan's approach is refreshingly different from those who have gone before her.

Rejecting the more obvious beach scenes and sweeping sea shots, she has chosen instead to entice her audience into the interior of the Island; It is a trip well worth taking.

This is the lesser known, jealously guarded bailiwick of ancient families who live in ancient mansions, where the heady scent of cedar fuses with summer frangipani. Even outside, the viridian foliage adds to the sense of enclosure -- a cage gilded by softly golden hues, but a cage, nevertheless. Thus, she skilfully establishes the claustrophobic setting against which the perfectly mannered Anglo-Bermudian family live lives of icy reticence. This is an uncomfortably silent world, broken by politely monosyllabic exchanges that effectively create a sense of ambivalent emotions engendered by an approaching wedding.

The story centres around a young girl (charmingly played by attractive young Bermudian actress, Cynthia Kirkwood) who learns that her father is to marry her dead mother's sister. Simple motions, such as cutting her father's hair, or tying his tie become symbols of repressed emotion. Isolated actions, with the camera lingering as full-bloomed roses are placed in a vase, or sugar cubes dropped in a cup, take on an almost voluptuous significance.

Perhaps the highest point of tension occurs when she, her boyfriend and father (New York-based English actor Simon Prebble) swim in the serenely beautiful water-hole in their garden and indulge in a game of macho-man ducking -- are they trying to drown each other, we wonder? This particular display of jokesy hostility has been triggered by her father's barging in on a torrid little interlude of passion between the youngsters in the garden shed. Yes, this half-hour movie has a little of everything -- even a tasteful shot of Ms Kirkwood taking a bath.

Accustomed as most of us are to regular-length movies, Alison Swan has brilliantly succeeded in producing a film which, in spite of its brevity, immediately draws its audience into a world that is intriguingly ambivalent.

She leaves us wanting to know a little bit more, to get in even deeper inside these oddly inarticulate characters, to wish, in fact, that the film was longer.

On the debit side, the speakers (apparently borrowed for the occasion) were definitely faulty, which distorted some of the sound.

Local thespian talent also appearing in this film includes Danjou Anderson as the smooth-tongued lawyer, Laura Gorham as the bridesmaid and Don Jolliffe as a cherubically cheerful vicar.

-- Patricia Calnan Alison Swan at work.