The earth is in balance with the connection of sea, land, humankind, and the gods – or Puna’kioa, the circle of life. In our worldview, we therefore bear the inherent responsibility to care for all creatures that precede us, of which the coral polyp of the deep sea is our eldest ancestor. The proposed processes to mine and dredge the seafloor is to enter the realm of our creation, an intrusion into the most sacred place of creation. It is, perhaps, the ultimate kind of destruction with no known outcomes or consequences for the great ocean. It is our sacred place of creation, our country, and our home.
–Solomon Pili Kaho’ohalahala, Observer from Hawai’i at the 28th Session of the International Seabed Authority, Kingston, Jamaica, 2023
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Where you have set your mind begin the journey
Let your heart have no fear, keep your eyes on me.
–from The Epic of Gilgamesh
With a calamitous confluence of massive deep-sea mining operations looming and our world currently led by rapacious, ignoble leaders who could give a toss about anything else but making grotesque amounts of profit for themselves and their cronies at great risk to the survival of the planet we inhabit, in Eleanor Mortimer’s début feature, How Deep Is Your Love, a small group of mostly young, mostly female biologists races to collect and name the undiscovered species of the abyss, the last wilderness on earth. Through a series of serendipitous moments – in the following talk we circle back several times to the notion of serendipity – the film tells the story of how Eleanor got to accompany the scientists and the James Cook vessel’s crew, on a weeks-long mission on the open seas to explore the deepest depths.
The film left me with a feeling of having discovered something unexpected about the world, and about myself, restoring a sense of childlike curiosity, a feeling of being part of something much, much bigger. (This is a rare experience for me in watching documentaries these days.) In a twist of magical realism, as a consortium of international representatives of the Seabed Authority gather in a hall in Kingston, Jamaica, and the scientists’ taxonomic process continues in the labs and on the vessel, animated deep-sea animals begin to swim through our human environments – conference halls, laboratories, cityscapes.
I met Eleanor in 2022 in Prizren, Kosovo where a short film of hers was featured in the National Competition at DokuFest. Luma had been made with the help of Liridon Mustafaj, a local Albanian ecological activist and member of the Rivers Collective, an entity that has spent years campaigning for the protection of the Valbona River. Luma is a lyrical portrait about the Valbona, a body of water that has carved its way through the Albanian Alps over millennia, leaving its mark on the lives of the people who live beside its edges. Eleanor calls her filmic body of work overall, very “watery”, the one we discuss here, currently traveling the international festival circuit, no exception. As there are many modes of encountering water in its myriad forms, there are many modes of encountering love, and Eleanor strikes me as an artist that works from a place of deep devotion to both those things we humans literally cannot survive without. We are, lest we forget, moving bodies of water ourselves.
Born in 1988 in London, Eleanor grew up in Suffolk in Woodbridge near the Felixstowe docks, watching the ships and boats arriving and departing. Currently dividing her time between Folkestone and a house boat in London, she’s made a range of shorts including Territory (2015), which screened in competition at Sundance and won Best Short Documentary at Hot Docs; Seafarers (2016) for New York Times Op Docs; Bird (2019) for Channel 4 Random Acts; Bubble (2019), winner of Best Short Documentary at Festival dei Popoli; and the aforementioned Luma. How Deep Is Your Love is supported by Sundance and Sandbox Films. Eleanor received a Nat Geo Storytelling Fellowship and holds an MA in Directing Documentary from the National Film & Television School, London. In 2020, she founded Luna Films to create work about our connection to the environment.
Pamela Cohn (PC): Before getting a formal film school education, you were a self-taught filmmaker and editor as part of your protest and activism work, resulting in several short films, some commissioned by UK’s Channel 4. When did visual storytelling shift into a more artistic practice for you, where part of the proposition of filming something went beyond just the burning questions you needed to explore?
Eleanor Mortimer (EM): The first time I ever had an opportunity to pick up a camera, I was always grappling with that tension that happens when you document things as a form of self-expression against what’s happening around you at any given moment. I was studying languages for a year abroad in Paris, and I was living in a squat at the time. So, I had this grant money that was to go towards paying rent and used it instead to buy myself a small camera. I joined this kind of TV society at the university and would wander the streets of the city just filming. It was a revelatory experience. I’d always been a collector starting from when I was a kid; I would obsessively collect everything I found – stones, shells, drawings. I’d always kept a diary. Everything felt precious, needing to be saved from being lost to history. [laughing]
When I first picked up a camera, it was a discovery of possibilities around how one perceives details through the lens, of noticing things that one wouldn’t otherwise. Even when I was commissioned to do a piece, there was tension between the urge for self-expression, whilst also having to contain the particular world I happened to be filming. In other words, it wasn’t self-expression that came entirely from inside me, but rather in dialogue with other people. I grappled with that tension, and I still grapple with it now. I find it healthy, that reliance on other people. What I like about documentary films and why I’ve got so many more in my head that I want to make is because of that possibility of dialogue. It’s always incredibly exciting as an art form. I’ve spoken to other filmmakers who find that reliance frustrating. But I find it freeing when doors open to something I hadn’t even considered.
PC: Serendipity is something I’ve been pondering a lot lately in the context of nonfiction storytelling. When I first discovered How Deep Is Your Love as a project reader a couple of years ago, I happened to be reading a novel by Martin MacInnes called In Ascension. It’s about a female scientist who explores the deep sea on a boat that’s very similar to the boat in the film, so that was an interesting confluence. And then, oddly, the main protagonist, a brilliant scientist, later ends up going to outer space as an astronaut, just like animated versions of the sea creatures do when they appear to come out of the depths in the last part of your film. At first it feels quite whimsical and then, for me, I found myself close to tears at how moving that feels, the actualization of a literal shared space with these creatures from the deep.
EM: It’s meant to feel like a collision. I didn’t want those animations to be merely decorative, but to have it be a deeply emotional encounter. I was actually reading that MacInnes book during the edit of this film, and there’s this moment where the character describes the marine snow, dust from the surface that drifts to the bottom of the sea, all the “particles of the past” as she describes it, the dead things that sink to the bottom of the ocean that bring the depths back to life.
PC: Was the idea of being a passenger/observer on the vessel there all along, an essential aspect of making the film? That’s huge for a civilian to be invited on a mission like this. How did that happen?
EM: I think that documentary just demands a lot of trust in the process, and yes, a lot of motivation for this project was getting myself on a ship. But it was never a given to get on a vessel. It’s just not possible to just turn up and tell a group of scientists you’d like to join them on their two-month mission at sea. I embarked on this film in the full realization that that probably wasn’t going to happen or be allowed.
I spent a year and a half filming the minutiae of the taxonomic process this group of scientists was doing in their labs. I spent two days a week with them as they worked in a corner of the Natural History Museum while I was teaching at University College London, documenting them as they were documenting these tiny animals.
It was exactly the right place for me to be because I was in a mode of deep self-questioning around my role as a filmmaker, the role as an observer. I had been in the midst of two films I hadn’t really been able to finish for various ethical reasons. They involved very vulnerable people, and I wasn’t able to continue to justify exposing them to this kind of scrutiny that can occur in documentary. They weren’t doing so well, and I couldn’t carry on documenting them as I had been doing. I go back to that tension between the need for self-expression and the world as it exists. Your artistic vision involves someone else’s daily life, you know? Sometimes it tips over into a place of self-absorption; the synergy wasn’t working anymore.
I went into this film, in part, to continue to explore what the act of observation is, and that’s what the scientists were doing every single day. And there was also a certain darkness to what they were doing. These were animals brought up from the deep sea. They couldn’t and didn’t survive that journey. And yet at the same time, there was extreme love and care, and attention paid to these microscopic animals. I felt these scientists and the work they’re doing are also overlooked. I used the opportunity to shoot with them to overcome the more negative repercussions of what I do, to really explore what that’s about. The subject matter contains a lot of ethical conundrums. The science of taxonomy itself, of course, has a colonialist background; there’s a lot of thorny territory. I wanted to grapple with that and highlight the grey areas.
That was the reason why, after a year and a half spent with them, I received a phone call in January of 2023 telling me that there was an opening on the ship. And that they were leaving the following week! The serendipitous thing here is that a piece of equipment they were going to take didn’t work, therefore the people operating it didn’t need to go, so a berth opened up at the last moment. I had spent a couple of weeks teaching them to film, planning to send them off with cameras. I showed them films like Leviathan and loads of other stuff featuring shipping vessels at sea to inspire them. The drawbacks of this sudden gift meant I had to quit my teaching job and leave my cat and my boat for months at very short notice.
PC: Beyond the physiological pressures of sleep deprivation, disorientation and other adaptations of being out to sea for weeks on end, what preyed on you psychologically and emotionally? We’ve seen lots of instances of embedded filmmakers in many different situations, but here you are with people you’ve been filming with already, but just two times a week in their lab – as opposed to living all together 24/7 on a vessel that’s so far out at sea, you don’t see any birds, or other ships for weeks.
EM: Yes, you’re completely cut off from your world. There was enough internet bandwidth to send maybe one message per day and an occasional call on the satellite phone. For everyone on board, this was our entire world, physically so distant from everything we knew. It sort of turns it all into the feeling of a dream. Burying yourself in another world is what documentary filmmaking is to a certain extent, but this was extreme. There were very strict routines on board – times to eat, etc. The main events or rituals of everyday life were sunrise and sunset. For me, it was an incredibly spiritual experience, the smallness of humans, the largeness of everything around us. You’ve got 5,000 meters below you to remind you of that. The ship is a very unnatural, mechanical environment. But it’s also the lifeforce between you and complete oblivion.
PC: I’d like to discuss the science of taxonomy that is featured in the film – again, a very morally ambiguous legacy for some of the reasons we’ve been speaking about in terms of extraction, money, the “power” if you will, of getting to name previously unidentified species. But I’d like to also hear what you have to say about it in relation to the dramaturgy of the film. The moral quandaries you end up exploring are handled with so much finesse and complexity, but they, in fact, do not take up the lion’s share of the film. How did you and your team figure out how to move into this significant dramaturgical shift that happens in the last half hour?
EM: It was a hugely complex edit. My work in short films means that I get to tell stories in a purely visual way and, of course, that’s my overall instinct as a filmmaker. The challenges that this film posed were all these complexities I was keen to include – and had to include since the story, or stories, here were so huge. In fact, it would have been disingenuous otherwise not to inform the audience about certain things in order to understand the images. The biggest question in the edit then was what order do we need to tell this story for people to remain emotionally engaged with the characters? Nicole Halova, an editor with the most incredible instincts, has a hugely creative mind and that meant, that as a team, we never quite approached anything in any deeply logical way. We did really try to do the thing where you stick things on the wall and move them around to put things in order, but that absolutely did not work at all for us. There were edited moments that we got excited about and went from there, totally in tune with one another in that kind of more intuitive approach.
There was a larger debate around the Greenpeace protest segment and the other large debate was around when we talk about the deep-sea mining, as well as the moral quandaries of the scientists. The Greenpeace boat appearing is what bursts the bubble of the magical tone on the boat and under the sea. There were those who thought that event should appear very early on in the film. That’s not how it happened in real life; the Greenpeace boat did really appear at the end of the voyage, and I felt it necessary to keep it towards the end of the film. The amazing Maya Hawke was the editing consultant who encouraged me and gave me the confidence to put my voice in the film. She came on quite early, for the teaser, in fact. But she also felt the Greenpeace segment should come earlier. We needed to navigate giving the spectator enough to follow the narrative, but to also perceive the scientists as neither villains, nor heroes. I wanted the film to reside in this non-hierarchical space, a feminist form of filmmaking that was the antithesis of a hero’s journey. It was this collective muddling along in a humbler way, grappling with the burdens of the colonial history of what they do, the complexities even around how they realize their funding.
To me, it felt more lifelike that way, as well as how it feels to be operating as a filmmaker having to face our own legacies as explorers of human behavior. By the end of the film, I wanted it to be apparent that we are capable of grappling with all of it, and we need to understand our role in the bigger picture of what humans have done in the past. We can forge a different way of looking at things in the future. That’s where the imaginary comes in.
PC: What was apparent as well, since we’re talking about the work your protagonists do in line with what you do, they seemed just as excited about the filming, about the documentation, as they were about the actual voyage. You stay solely in the realm of the human perspective and the reason you were able to do that is because you were given permission to do so by your protagonists. I’m not sure even other filmmakers realize how rare and special that is.
EM: I’ve learned, through the making of this film, that you must lean into what is there and what is being offered to you. I did a lot of communicating with the scientists about why I was interested in them and how I felt about how the audiences would care about these animals if they could see how much they cared. They really understood that. Their abundant excitement and enthusiasm came so freely; I didn’t have to work hard for that or force it.
If there was a struggle with them, it was around the fact that they really didn’t want to express opinions that were political. Some of the film’s funders thought it essential that the scientists express their thoughts about the wider global picture. But that wasn’t what they wanted to give me or was easily forthcoming. My decision then was to roll with what was there and what was willingly given, rather than pushing against the grain. They were incredibly generous with so much else, so I just didn’t care to push them into some zone in which they were uncomfortable. So, in terms of what you’re talking about, yes, the film was shaped around that, what these people were giving me. I mean there are a lot of opinions in the world! I didn’t want to make a film about yet more opinions. [laughing] The pros and cons of deep sea mining are essential and there are films that exist that grapple with that. I think it was that point where I turned away from what could have been a hurdle or a block and went down another route. What ends up on the screen is reflective of those relational dynamics.
PC: And a reflection of who you are. There are some gifted filmmakers who remain staggeringly inflexible when they’re working – you can ultimately see it in the edit. It’s a personality, I suppose, to be so concentrated on what one wants to the exclusion of all else, including a healthy relationship with the subjects of the film.
EM: I know some documentary filmmakers who do feel frustrated constantly waiting for the thing to happen that’s inside their heads. I am not that kind of maker. I’m much more interested in the interactions between me and the subjects in the film and what might happen. I’m an open book in terms of my working process and that’s worked well for me. I think it’s a good way of being and of making films because then the people you’re filming feel a sense of control. For me, they must always know it’s a collaboration. They are willingly being vulnerable having a camera on them. I just perceive it as sustainable practice, really. You must be accountable to the people you’re filming. You don’t want to leave behind carnage with every film you make. That’s the last thing I want, anyway.
PC: At the conference in Kingston, as you do on the ship, you need to grapple with the space itself, meaning the actual building and its architecture – which is quite grand but also sterile. You’re denied access to the inner sanctum of the hall where the action takes place. I went back to copy down what Solomon Pili Kaho’ohalahala, the observer from Hawai’i, says when he’s given an opportunity to address the authority. No non-Indigenous person, in a setting like that, would speak in the way he did. Even the scientists that “know” these creatures as well as anyone can, will not speak for them.
EM: We can again return to serendipity in meeting Uncle Sol. The producer, Jacob Thomas, and I arrived in this space to film, and found that it was completely impregnable. We could only be eavesdroppers as to what was happening inside the hall. The legalese of the language and all the rest made me question how I was going to penetrate it. It was like there were these two unseen worlds, the deep sea and the meetings of the International Seabed Authority where these important decisions were being made. How to make people care and understand what was happening there?
I met Uncle Sol on one of the lunch breaks when we were allowed to enter the hall. He had a mango on his desk. He spoke to me about only being able to be an observer, Hawai’i not being a sovereign nation. His people’s connection to the deep sea was a jigsaw piece that needed to be in the film – and that had fallen in my lap – the missing piece appearing at this key moment to show that it’s all connected to the science, connected with us being small in the network of bigger things, and connected with my intention to illustrate that the sea is this large, ancient body that covers most of the world and we are just one species in the midst of it. He was able to voice things that the scientists weren’t willing to say or things that weren’t really part of their own worldview to say. The goddess of documentaries hit me with that one. [laughing] I do honestly see things that way, when I know that things are being given as a gift. So, when he made his speech, that was our opportunity to introduce these animated animals entering the scene, to help us visually realize the fullness of what’s at stake. He says that the deep sea is the birthplace of all life on Earth and that’s true scientifically as well. The unknown consequences of destroying it could be catastrophic – we just don’t know. The scientists won’t really say things like this, that the consequences could be catastrophic because, of course, they don’t like saying things that aren’t scientifically provable.
PC: There’s also a different sense of time and space for them. One of them even says that she will accomplish just an infinitesimal part of the work that needs to be done. And that’s just to figure out what she’s looking at, with the ultimate intention of being able to name the creatures she studies.
EM: If there was one thought I wanted people to leave the film pondering, I think, it’s that slowness. Let’s slow down. These decisions are huge; we humans like to make things happen at lightning pace compared to the evolution of life on Earth. There is a wealth of wisdom from Indigenous communities, a wealth of wisdom that comes from places not even being considered in terms of these huge decisions humanity needs to make. Do we continue to mine the last wilderness which has grown over millennia, a terrain that is not going to come back once it’s gone? It’s not renewable. Uncle Sol’s contribution helps us see the larger picture. It helps us to place our own species in context, illustrating how very small we are.
Pamela Cohn is a Helsinki-based critic, writer, film & video curator, story structure consultant, and festival moderator. She’s the author of Lucid Dreaming: Conversations with 29 Filmmakers (OR Books, New York & London, 2020), and co-producer and host of The Lucid Dreaming Podcast: Conversations on Cinema, Art & Moving Image.
