All aboard for a look at trawler life

 By Daniel Nelson

Leviathan

Image by Leviathan

It’s filmed on a week-long commercial fishing expedition off the Massachusetts coast, and captures the rawness of shipboard life and the rawness of death as the automatic nets discharge their load and the catch crash and slither into large metal trays.

Humans generally don’t empathise with fish as much as we do with cows, but if you haven’t seen such scenes the effect may well be the same as from a first visit to an abattoir.

It’s more ethnography than entertainment. You don’t learn facts about fish or fishermen: what you get from the film comes from observing the clanking machinery, the constant hosing down, the wheeling birds, the mute fish, the boredom of a pre-sleep midnight snack.

It’s immersive, vivid, kaleidoscopic, as the film-makers claim, and certainly doesn’t romanticise trawler life. There’s a rare touch of humour at the end when the credits include Hippoglossus hippoglossus, Placopecten Magellanicus, Pollachius Virens and other species, along with Captain Brian Jannelle and his crew.

Some will find this a gruelling 90 minutes, but if you want an unmediated, commentary-free insight into trawler fishing, this is it.

You might also take it as a metaphor for the way we are hoovering up the Earth’s natural resources, but that’s up to you.

·         Leviathan is released in UK on 29 November