A Sea Change: Imagine a World Without Fish Barbara Ettinger, USA, 2009, 81 minutes
Wednesday, May 12 | 1:00pm | Pacific Cinémathèque
When a retired school teacher named Sven Huseby read Elizabeth Kolbert’s article The Darkening Seas published in the New Yorker, he was so profoundly disturbed by the facts presented in her essay that he set out to discover exactly what’s going on underneath the surfaces of the world’s oceans.
Far from the cataclysmic Hollywood blockbusters of exploding tidal waves, earthquakes and firestorms, the end of the world may already be happening at the smallest level, with pteropods unable to form shells in ocean water that has become too acidic to survive in. Ocean acidification could begin a domino effect up the food chain, with a massive die-off at the first link (pteropods are the primary food source for salmon and other larger fish). The disappearance of these tiny, beautiful creatures, with their gossamer shells, could prove disastrous to all life on earth, including the more than one billion people who need fish to survive.
As much a personal journey as a physical one, Huseby is motivated by the fact that his generation are bequeathing a poisoned and dying world to their children and grandchildren, including his own grandson Elias. Journeying from Alaska to California to Norway, Sven gathers evidence and information, talking to expert oceanographers, climatologists and biologists to paint a picture of a race against time. As carbon dioxide continues to be produced at massive levels, the tipping point is hovering just on the horizon. This slow dissolve of the world’s oceans, largely unwitnessed and little understood, could prove to be the beginning of the end. Director Barbara Ettinger brings a level of urgency to the subject, uncovering the need to better understand exactly what we are doing to the world’s largest resource.
A deeply personal film, A Sea Change is one more wake up call about the perilous state of the planet. The reality of a planet that has no marine life of any kind, coral reefs to blue whales, is almost too terrible to contemplate.
2009 Aloha Accolade Award, Honolulu International Film Festival
Best World Documentary, Sedona International Film Festival
Classified for younger audiences. No membership required.
Director’s biography
Director Barbara Ettinger’s first film Martha and Ethel screened at Sundance and was distributed theatrically by Sony Pictures Classics. She and her husband Sven Huseby cofounded Niijii Films, through which they produced Two Square Miles, aired nationally on PBS’s Independent Lens in 2006 and 2007. Two Square Miles is a documentary about the conflicts that unfold as a proposed coal-fired cement plant threatens to reshape the small town of Hudson, NY. A Sea Change is their second project.
