If you’re able to make the trip out to Columbia this weekend, it’s the best time of the year to do so. The annual True/False Film Festival kicks off on February 27th, and contains with four days worth of new documentaries ranging from the popular and conventional to the inventive, esoteric, and essayistic. The fest has long been a pilgrimage sight for adventurous movie-goers for good reason. This year, one of the more intriguing films will have a screening three out of the four nights. All the better, as it’s well worth seeing. Eleanor Mortimer’s feature debut, How Deep Is Your Love?, hits the sweet spot for True/False docs, as it combines the wide appeal of National Geographic subject matter with a methodical, cinematic quality, unconventional creative choices, and political urgency. In that sense, it acts as a kind of sampler for the variety of films you can see at the festival.
Mortimer follows a crew of oceanographers, deep sea biologists, and taxonomists as they explore the abyssal zone of the ocean in search of undiscovered species. Living in utter darkness and in near-freezing temperatures, these creatures are unlike anything seen on land, bearing a closer resemblance to the protozoa one might find under a microscope, or something thought up for an alien world in a science fiction film. They’re at once strange and beautiful, like surreal works of art on the ocean floor. And they’re extremely fragile, incapable of surviving on or even near the surface, due to the difference in pressure.
The vulnerability of this ecosystem is a recurring theme in the film, which has deep sea mining as an ever-looming context to the seemingly neutral activities of expedition. Although personally motivated by a thirst for discovery and knowledge, the scientists are technically tied up with the mining outfits that want to harvest the mineral-rich nodules on the ocean floor for numerous applications, including green energy projects like the manufacture of solar panels. The International Seabed Authority (ISA) requires companies to fund the research depicted in the film in order to assess the environmental impact of their activities.
In addition to filming the crew, Mortimer recorded discussions at the ISA’s last session in Kingston, Jamaica, shedding light on the competing motivations of nations within, some of whom want to prevent more mining and others who want to increase it for economic and sociopolitical purposes. The extent to which these expeditions curtail the destruction of the seabeds is debatable. I’m of the opinion that a deep-sea mining company will mine anyway, and at least these scientists are creating reports that might be persuasive for representatives in regulatory bodies like the ISA. But some environmental organizations, like Greenpeace, are highly critical of both the ISA and the scientists, who they see as enablers.
The film contains plenty of beauty and joy from the simple fact that these creatures are amazing and fascinating, and are aided by the enthusiasm of the ship’s biologists and an excellent, sometimes quirky musical score. But a subtle sense of dread and loss also pervades throughout because of this larger political context and the undeniable fact that expeditions such as these create their own share of destruction. The subjects of the film clearly grapple with the fact that they have to kill these animals in order to study them. Mortimer makes the curious choice of always referring to the biologists as humans, going so far as to include “Homo sapiens” along with their names in introductory scenes. While the larger environmental subjects are treated fairly directly, little touches like these create a subtler commentary about the destructive nature of humans as animals, the imbalance we create in ecosystems, and the inherently intrusive nature of animal science.
It’s rare to see a nature documentary as well-balanced as this, one that offers such a satisfying viewing experience via captivating aesthetics while also leaving you with plenty to think about afterwards, offering food for thought that stretches from the political to the philosophical. | Nic Champion
