The 2024 Ocean Film Festival currently touring the country is the 11th iteration of a one-night program of short to medium length films celebrating all things nautical. Its continuing popularity is clear from the packed foyer at The Brighton Dome bustling with excited ocean fans of all ages. Conservation is very much at the heart of the event. A rousing speech by a representative from the night’s sponsor PADI, a scuba-diving training organisation, emphasises how we live on an ocean planet and we need to fall in love with those oceans to help preserve the world we live in. It’s a resonantly romantic message echoed by the films that follow.
The first offering of the night, The Call of the Cold, follows three extreme sports enthusiasts as they take a journey to the harsh sub-zero terrain of Iceland where they tackle a kind of icy triathlon of surfing, fissure climbing and free diving beneath the ice. It captures the plucky daredevil camaraderie of three friends intent on exploring water in its coldest forms. In their talking head interviews they describe the exhilaration, the geological profundity of the landscape, and with typical Australian understatement, how the freezing water is a bit “chilly on the willy”. Alongside their blokey gung-ho exuberance, there’s a deep respect for the land they’re exploring, a sobering acknowledgement that they’re having an impact on the landscape they wish to preserve and an awareness that limiting this is key.
The environmental impact that the human race is having on the world’s oceans is further explored in Tess Felix: Portrait of an Artist. Tess creates impressive photo-realistic portraits out of the pieces of plastic that litter the world’s oceans. Her detailed mosaics underline the sheer range of colours and shapes of the plastics that we’re filling the world with, which will end up sitting around until the end of the time unless we do something about it.
The longest film of the evening follows solo adventurer Lisa Blair as she attempts to become the first woman to sail solo around Antarctica. Ice Maiden charts her journey from raising funds, renovating the craft (which she names “Climate Action Now”) to setting out on the mammoth voyage itself. It’s a lurching, terrifying account, as she faces storms with swells of up to five metres that inundate the vessel with water, endangering the voyage at numerous catastrophic points. The shaky camera footage of her desperately trying to fix the broken sails and her video diary entries where she is evidently fearing for her life are gripping and emotional. By all accounts it comes across as a pretty insane endeavour, and this is reflected by her friends and family who freely admit they think she’s bonkers. But it stands as a testament to the human will to conquer the oceans whilst giving it the utmost respect and raising awareness at the same time.
After the interval follows a boisterous raffle offering various ocean-themed prizes and the second helping of three films begins with The Whale Song. Renowned marine biologist Nan Hauser describes her passion for humpback whale song, which began when she heard a vinyl recording of a humpback song from Bermuda in 1964. Since then she has studied the animals and learnt about them in great detail, to the point where she can mimic their songs, recognise the differences between particular animals from particular years and even take a ride on one of their heads without being swished to smithereens. Alongside this, we see a superstar DJ who makes an EDM club banger out of the original whale song that Nan found so inspiring. It’s not entirely clear what this adds to the story apart from implying that the whale song isn’t beautiful enough in itself and needs to be chopped up and sampled to be made into real music.
Taking us into the inner lives of the aquatic inhabitants of a coral reef, Metropolis imagines the underwater ecosystem as an anthropomorphised fish city with the busy workmanlike fish going about their daily business hunting for food or becoming food. Colourful characters like angelfish, starfish, nudibranchs and the chameleonic frogfish flicker and zip about to a comedic soundtrack of Tchaikovsky and Hawaiian guitars. There’s a voiceover telling the rather contrived stories in the style of an Attenborough or Springwatch’s Chris Packham. It’s very silly but will delight the kids, and the glimpse of the humans swimming about just feet away delivers a poignant message of the precarious proximity of our often conflicting ecosystems.
Perhaps the most shocking yet inspiring story is left for last. The Call tells of photographer and surfer Mike Coots who lost a leg in a shark attack in his home of Hawaii at the age of 18. What one might expect to be a story of tragedy and ruined potential is turned on its head as Coots becomes even more galvanised to dive back into the seas and he ends up becoming an extraordinarily talented photographer of surfers and sharks. The resilience of the man is breathtaking, to the extent that he claims the day he lost his leg to a shark was the best day of his life. It’s a resounding testament to the power of positivity and the importance of respecting the ocean and all who dwell within her.
Brighton Dome, Wednesday 18th September 2024
