Synopsis
By embarking on a trawler to document one of mankind’s oldest endeavours, in a stream of extraordinary images, Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor capture the collaborative clash of man, nature, and machine. Shot on a dozen digital cameras – tossed and tethered, passed from fisherman to filmmaker, merging sea and sky – this documentary alerts us to the dangers of intensive fishing while also revealing the breathtakingly stunning beauty of the ocean’s depths.
A word from Tënk
Filmed aboard a fishing vessel off the coast of Boston, Leviathan pushes the limits of the filmable: the two American anthropologists and filmmakers describe the crushing and dehumanising mechanism of the profit economy, starting from Hobbes’ theories and using a dozen Go-Pro cameras attached to fishing nets or dropped into the sea. Far from any anthropocentric reference, viewers find themselves submerged in a disorientating, all-encompassing panicky experience among schools of starfish, flocks of seagulls gliding on the water’s surface and fish flailing in the nets. A work of extraordinary formal innovation and visual power that emphasises with each new shot the need for ethnographic documentation projects to focus their methodological concerns on how to film something unknown. A radical and innovative film, a milestone in contemporary cinema that will be talked for a long time.
Daniela Persico
Programmer and critic
