Dir. Siebren de Haan and Lonnie van Brummelen
Shortly before Siebren de Haan and Lonnie van Brummelen set off to document the Urk, a remote fishing community located in the Dutch “Bible Belt,” the national government announced significant cuts to its culture budget, effectively slashing the film’s funding. Undeterred, the filmmakers made their way to Urk and found common ground with the fishermen on the issue of government intrusion. As the story goes, the Urk have been the subjects of a social engineering experiment dating back to 1939 when the government undertook a massive public works project that connected the Urk’s island home with the mainland in the hopes that the fishermen would take up agriculture. The Urk resisted the government’s nudge and continued to fish. Subsequently, the Urk have withstood a litany of environmental, regulatory and market challenges and continued to fish. It’s the kind of obstinate resistance that a couple of filmmakers still choosing to shoot on celluloid can identify with.
De Haan and van Brummelen make the link between fishing and filmmaking clear in a series of long block text scrolls that also detail the filmmaking process and the Urk’s emergence as indispensable collaborators. The resulting film is an insightful, often humorous ethnographic portrait of the insular community, where form and content are connected to show the Urk’s (and the filmmakers’) uneasy existence trying to maintain their way of life.
For a film about a fishing community, very little of the film is devoted to the actual fishing process, but an early sequence does capture the Urk at work. We see the nets cast, retrieved, and emptied, and watch as the fish are cleaned, gutted, and iced. With the sun beaming down on the open sea, the filmmakers are in their comfort zone. Landscape filmmakers by trade, the duo know how to shoot a stunning vista, and through their camera, life aboard a fishing trawler is idyllic. The fishermen are in their element as well, ambling around the boat performing their tasks with detached precision and efficiency. No doubt this is grueling work (scrolling text relays the fishermen’s work/nap/repeat schedule) but de Haan and van Brummelen choose to convey the serenity of life at sea.
This sequence and an observational scene at a shipyard that closes the film sandwich a number of staged reenactments featuring the Urkers as performers (some Urkers played themselves; others, citing religious reasons, declined to appear on camera and used surrogates). Using real conversations recorded and transcribed the year prior to filming, de Haan and van Brummelen scripted these sequences with significant input from the Urk. These Brechtian scenes are deliberately artificial, most notably because of the Urkers stilted performances, and with little experience filming dialogue, de Haan and van Brummelen embrace the clumsiness. The scenes are funny in a way that bad acting can be, but also underscore the community’s contemporary existence. Since the Urk contributed significantly to the script, it’s important to note what they pushed to have included in a documentary about their village — mostly dialogues about the burdensome regulations and shifting market conditions that threaten their way of life. Had this film been made generations earlier, you can imagine the Urkers spinning tales about their mythic, innate connection with the sea (one fisherman notes the uselessness of quota regulations as the Urk would be able to self-regulate the fish stock), but now their identity is tied to their ability to adapt to a rapidly and constantly evolving set of standards and policies. The artificial and awkward nature of these scenes emphasize the unnatural space where the Urk now reside.
Near the end of the film, de Haan and van Brummelen, through scrolling text, instruct the audience to study the grain on an image of water slowly rolling toward the dock. It’s another example of the link between film and fish, and a reminder that just as the Urk have resisted the relative ease of fish farming, the filmmakers have eschewed the convenience of digital filmmaking. It’s a poetic image that suggests there’s beauty in choosing to do things the hard way.
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