How Deep Is Your Love
(UK, 100 min.)
Dir. Eleanor Mortimer
Programme: World Showcase
This accomplished film has a bit of everything. It’s part gorgeous journey along one of the world’s deepest sea beds, part political conundrum, part extended science lesson, and part portrait of a team of passionate oceanographers. How Deep Is Your Love tracks an exploration designed to determine the impact of resource extraction from the ocean floor as mining interests seek to get approval for their foraging. The film is particularly resonant in Canada now that BC-based The Metals Company is slavering at the news that Donald Trump wants to reduce restrictions on deep sea mining off the U.S. coast.
The oceanographers on board the James Cook head to the Clarion Clipperton Zone in the South Seas with the advantages of advanced technology, including a robot equipped with video, designed to gather up precious finds for the team’s scrutiny. It takes a full five hours for the machine to get to the bottom of the ocean. The suspense deepens by knowing that if any harm should come to the robot, the mission could fail.
At the same time, the International Seabed Authority (ISA) is convening as part of (way too) long-term deliberations on whether to create limits to seabed mining. With powerful mining interests lobbying furiously, the resistance to ISA meddling is fierce.
These companies also have huge advantages. In order to determine the extent of their disturbances, scientists have to identify new species. It takes 14 years to describe a new species, to collect its DNA, to work out where its sits in the ecosystem, and to name it. Meanwhile, mines can extract 14 tons of nodules from the ocean floor in just one hour.
Tension arises when a ship bearing environmental activists comes barrelling towards the James Cook. They’re protesting against any mining in the area and see the oceanographers as enablers of corrupt capitalists. The threat passes, but not before we have to consider whether the James Cook is a potential a boon to mining interests or a passionate protector of the environment.
Whatever its political resonances, How Deep Is Your Love (the Bee Gees hit is never heard here) is one spectacular visual extravaganza. Some of the sea animals look more like monsters than anything resembling mollusks or fish. Others are delicate creatures in splendidly vibrant colours.
The only cavil I have with this excellent doc is the narration by director and cinematographer Eleanor Mortimer. The content is excellent but her tone, while a bracing contrast the sound of a plummy male voice, is quiet, almost breathless. It’s sometimes hard to hear, which makes it sound like Mortimer isn’t fully committed to the words.
But the passion of the scientists is palpable, a paradox considering that the sea creatures and humans can’t possibly co-exist in the same place. It all makes you wonder why, when there’s so much still to discover here on Earth, we call outer space the final frontier.
