The lives of boys in a maritime boarding school are interwoven with the sea. This documentary reveals how changeable the sea is, immeasurable yet vulnerable.
A Sea Change revolves around K.W. IBIS, a maritime boarding school in Ostend (Belgium). In the buildings that look out towards the sea, boys from six to sixteen sleep, eat and play. They learn how to read the sea, sail with a fishing boat and help haul in the catch. While the fishermen are at work, the pupils observe the by-catch and gaze at the swaying horizon. In the classrooms, the impetuous sea is captured in maps. On sea maps, there are no storms and there is no time. But nonetheless, the sea is capricious and silently changing. The coast is permeated with nostalgia, as if the sea had turned its face to the past. The fishing fleet will disappear, together with many endangered species of fish. The fish auction hall of Ostend is in decay, the harbour coated in rust. Nonetheless, a new colour is appearing from underneath the peeling paint.
“In A Sea Change, although the sea seems to have been “mastered” and plundered with everything that technology has to offer, the life of these boys is told to us with old-fashioned charm. Their games with torches in the dark- ness of silent dormitories, the aquatic choreographies suddenly appearing at sea and the starched costumes of the young sea cadets send us back to other times with nostalgia. At times, the film itself, behind its very contemporary appearances of images of the sea filled with formal findings, plays with the traditional and now dated aspects of the documentary form. Immersed in the day-to-day life of the children, whose future is traced out on digital nautical charts and tracked via sonar, we thus revive the imagination this troubling enormity holds beneath its waves.”
Madeline Robert
