The Sea is History

Louis Henderson

2016 | 00:28:00 | France | English | Color | Stereo | 16:9 | HD video

Collection: Single Titles

Tags: Environment, History, Memory, Nature, Poetry

The Sea is History, made in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, is a free adaptation of the poem by Derek Walcott. The film is a materialist and animist critique of the monumentalization of European colonial history, reading the past instead as something intimately entangled within the present as a living and mutational thing made up of the living and the dead. It is in this sense that the film suggests a way beyond the boundary évent that could be called the Plantationocene (brought on with the onset of modernity and the system of globalized capitalism that started with the colonization of the Americas in 1492, with Columbus arriving in Ayiti; latter day Dominican Republic) and towards a possible "Chthulucenic" future of créolised assemblages as a politics of re-narrativising death within life.

Made in Santo Domingo — the first capital of the New World, and on Lago Enriquillo — a hyper-salinated lake, once part of the Caribbean sea, that is flooding the border with Haiti due to the drastic rise in sea temperatures that are currently deeply affecting the global ocean.

Pricing Information

Additional Formats/Uses
Request an Exhibition Quote Request an Archival Quote

Please contact info@vdb.org or visit http://www.vdb.org/content/prices-formats with any questions about the license types listed here.




Premiere

DocLisboa
Lisbon
2016

Exhibitions + Festivals

BFI London Film Festival 2016

Transmediale 2017

International Film Festival Rotterdam 2017