The folklore of Herefordshire will come into its own at the Borderlines Film Festival, which opens on Friday March 4.

As well as Chills in the Hills, a season of horror films set in remote countryside, the Festival hosts the launch of an innovative extended reality project that breathes new life into the stories collected by Ella Mary Leather in the early twentieth century.

Leather collected stories from all over Herefordshire that had been passed down through generations, both from people she encountered, and by researching written sources. Many of them contain strong elements of the supernatural and tap into something deep-rooted in a county that had remained largely untouched by industrialisation well into the late nineteenth century.

Local visual artists, MASH Cinema have taken four of Ella’s most powerful stories and, using a 360° camera, have reimagined them in the exact spot where they are set: Mordiford Church for the dragon or serpent that was reputed to appear at the confluence of the rivers Wye and Lugg; Hergest Court, near Kington for the truly terrifying Cwm annwn or dogs of hell; Arthur’s Stone, near Dorstone, for the tale of the Giant’s Elbow, one of the legends associated with King Arthur. There is one more as yet undisclosed location.

The five to six-minute films, narrated by the voice of ‘Ella’, are geolocked to specific places where they can be experienced by sounds, recorded binaurally, and 360° images that surround you. All you will need is a mobile phone with data, running the Vimeo app, and headphones to make the experience fully immersive.

The pandemic has played a significant role in how The Stories of Ella Mary Leather project has shaped up.

Dan Brown of MASH Cinema says: “Back in 2019, we had planned for the stories to be played out by actors around the 360° camera. Then Covid hit, and this became impossible. We changed tack and used digital animation and collage, and green screen techniques to transport viewers into the real space by artificial means. It enabled us to be more experimental in layering different types of textures on locations. It has a more magical and mysterious quality because of this.”

Launching on the closing weekend of Borderlines Film Festival at The Courtyard in Hereford, The Stories of Ella Mary Leather goes live on March 26.

Borderlines is supported by the BFI, awarding National Lottery funding, the Elmley Foundation and Hereford City Council and has been bringing cutting edge cinema to a multitude of rural venues, from market towns to small hamlets across Herefordshire, Shropshire, Malvern and the Welsh Marches for twenty years. It shares this anniversary with MASH Cinema, with which it has a longstanding association.

Borderlines runs from Friday 4 to Sunday March 20. Tickets and passes for both live and online sections of the Festival are on sale through borderlinesfilmfestival.org and in person or by phone through The Courtyard Hereford (01432 340555).