A magical film that explores the wonders of the deep sea through the eyes of a team of scientists and an underwater robot called Isis will be shown in selected cinemas across the UK next month.
The documentary, How Deep Is Your Love, offers a playful, irreverent and bittersweet look at our anthropocentric view of Earth, as it switches perspective from humans to deep sea animals and back again. It follows a research team from the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London, who sail for 12 days to reach a remote region called the Clarion Clipperton Zone, a biodiversity-rich area of the Pacific between Hawaii and Mexico. It takes Isis five hours to make the 3-mile (5km) descent to the bottom of this harsh world, where sunlight cannot penetrate, and where nodules rich in minerals mark it out as a hotspot for industrial mining.
It is a race against time for the scientists to identify new species before deep sea mining threatens to wipe out fragile ecosystems for ever. Scientists estimate that only 0.001% of the deep sea floor – categorised by some as more than 500 metres below the sea’s surface, where sunlight fades to total darkness – has been observed by humans.
The film is an ode, says director Eleanor Mortimer, to the taxonomists and biologists who spend “hours and hours counting the legs of a minuscule animal you can’t even see with the naked eye” and to the strange creatures of the abyssal plain, of which we know so little. Even when painstakingly identified, and DNA collected, it can take up to 14 years to name a species, Mortimer says.
“It’s the challenge of the deep sea,” says Mortimer, who shares the scientists’ desire to demystify life in the deep. “Most people never go there, and yet it’s a huge part of our planet we need to connect with. That was the motive behind the film. I want people to fall in love with the deep sea, I want people to connect with it.”
She became “obsessed” with the region, but could not work out how to make a film until, by chance, she met Muriel Rabone, the film’s science adviser and co-producer, who told Mortimer about the NHM team.
“Their love and curiosity and excitement have become infectious,” says Mortimer.
Most of the film takes place at sea, or at the International Seabed Authority (ISA) in Jamaica, which regulates activities in the seabed beyond national jurisdiction.
While How Deep Is Your Love does not shy away from complex questions of humanity’s ever-swelling appetite for nature’s resources, it is neither an activist anti-exploitation film like Seaspiracy or a nature-based, David Attenborough Blue Planet-style documentary. Instead, Mortimer’s dreamlike narration poses philosophical questions of the nature of our planet, while sharing the scientists’ sense of wonder, as they watch a series of screens linked to a camera 5,000 metres below. “Oh, I love this sea cucumber,” says one, as a neon pink sea creature, dubbed “Barbie Pig”, comes into view.
Other brightly coloured amorphous creatures are given names like Headless Chicken Monster and Psychedelic Elvis Worm. There is a poignant moment, soundtracked by the melancholy strains of Portishead’s Glory Box, which records a dilemma the scientists face: to be studied, a species has to be brought to the surface, a journey the life form cannot survive. “I feel a bit like the Nicole Kidman character in Paddington,” says one researcher: “I want that bear in a jar on my desk!” Another admits to dreaming of tucking sea cucumbers into bed.
In a final twist of fantasy, Mortimer brings deep sea animals and humans into the same world. The ghostly stars of the expedition are superimposed on the corridor walls of the ISA – which earlier this year once again concluded negotiations without a regulatory framework and with significant gaps in the data needed to establish environmental thresholds for mining – and in the streets of London at night.
“Perhaps the connections made through the film can trigger something like empathy,” says Mortimer.
How Deep Is Your Love, a Sandbox presentation produced by Luna Films and Ngauruhoe Films, is opening in cinemas in the UK on 2 October.
