Fathomless

2024, 28’
UK

‘Fathomless’ is a poetic and sensorial meditation on marine life and the human desire for revelation. For a human and a marine animal to meet, one of them must enter an environment hostile to their body and utterly foreign to their most fundamental ways of being. ‘Fathomless’ explores the connection between ways of looking, forms of mediation, and ideologies of mastery and control by observing dried and broken bodies preserved in a Victorian-era natural history collection, the movements and sensory capacities of living creatures held captive in aquariums, and chance encounters underwater at a coral reef. Rather than aiming to unveil aquatic wonders or impart scientific knowledge, the film instead probes the limits of the visible and seeks to meet marine animals more on their own terms through the use of embodied camerawork, extreme close-ups, and an emphasis on the auditory.