A thrilling, visually stunning portrait of the dangerous world of commercial fishing industry.
An innovative, unorthodox documentary film set aboard a hulking fishing vessel as it navigates the treacherous waves off the New England coast. The film captures the harsh, unforgiving world of the fishermen in starkly haunting detail. Employing an arsenal of cameras that pass freely from film crew to ship crew, and swoop from below sea level to astonishing bird's-eye views, Leviathan presents a vivid, almost-kaleidoscopic representation of the work, the sea, the machinery and the players, both human and marine. Unlike anything you have ever seen: entirely dialogue-free, a purely visceral, cinematic experience.
»We’re definitely interested in nature. Most novels, plays and films made by humans are really human-centric as well, and we humans are the one animal that doesn’t consider ourselves an animal. We don’t even consider ourselves a part of nature. So, it’s fine to come up with a different representation of humanity that is a more humble re-contextualization of humans as part of this much larger ecological and cosmic kind of dimension. It’s not as if we say we want to make a cinematic or science or nature doc. We’re experimenting and improvising and pushing ourselves in ways we haven’t done before.«
- Lucien Castaing-Taylor
Lucien Castaing-Taylor in Véréna Paravel
Anthropologists and artists who work in film, video, and photography. Born in 1966, in Liverpool, UK, Castaing-Taylor has taught at Harvard University since 2002. He is also the University’s Director of the Sensory Ethnography Lab, in 2006 joined by Véréna Paravel. Born in 1971 in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, Paravel received her PhD in anthropology and communication sciences from the Université de Toulouse II.