IN TOO DEEP: JEMIMA ROBINSON AND THE OCEAN FILM FESTIVAL

As the month-long run of the Ocean Film Festival Australia (OFFA) nears its end, Festival Director Jemima Robinson reflects upon her vision to bring a celebration of oceanic culture to a population with a close affinity to the aquatic landscape. The morning after the sold-out session at Sydney’s prestigious Cremorne Orpheum Theatre, Robinson spoke to SCREEN-SPACE about her passion for the marine environment and the filmmaking that brings it to life on the bigscreen…

“Our mission is to inspire people to appreciate and care for our oceans,” she says of her 2014 programme, which features 12 shorts that screen over 2 hours. “We were really working along the Jacques Cousteau principal, (that) people will naturally want to protect what they love, so our overriding vision is to foster that love of the ocean.”  To this end, Robinson and her team sought key partnerships with environmental bodies such as Project Aware and the Nature Conservation Council, ensuring that audiences inspired by what they had just seen had avenues to pursue immediately. Says Robinson, “We felt it was important to offer our audience practical ways (in which) they can personally have a positive impact.”

The inaugural event came about after Robinson (pictured, right), as Director of the adventure-film promotional initiative Adventure Reels, oversaw the 2013 Australian schedule for the renowned San Francisco Ocean Film Festival (the group is also responsible for successfully shepherding a local season of the popular BANFF Mountain Film Festival). This year, she felt it was crucial to brand a local event, with homegrown content mixed into the screening schedule alongside works from around the globe.

“Local filmmakers have been incredibly supportive of the initiative, especially Tim Bonython and Mark Tipple,” she acknowledges. An internationally recognized producer, Bonython cut a short from his 2012 documentary Immersion, featuring the daredevil surfers who tackle the treacherous swells of Tasmania’s Shipstern’s Bluff; Tipple produced Duct Tape Surfing, the extraordinary story of a paraplegic who was able to experience the thrill of a board ride while taped to big-wave surfer Tyron Swan.

These films play alongside the very best of global aquatic cinema. From France, Via Decouvertes’ People Under The Sea (pictured, top) chronicles the installation of statue art under the Caribbean Sea; Hawaiian Kimi Werner explores her relationship with the ocean in the stunning odyssey, Variables; the culture of the Haenyeo, South Korea’s free-diving women, is revealed in Women of the Sea; the myriad of microscopic lifeforms who inhabit a Balinese feather hydroid are captured in the award-winning Hydropolis; Guilklame Nery, single-breath free dive world record holder, is profiled in the Sportlife Saga episode, Water, from The Netherlands; a quirky comedic short from Irish director Orla Walsh, Riders to the Sea; and, the breathtaking sand artistry of Tony Plant is celebrated in ‘Till The Luck Runs Out.

Of particular note are the Australian premieres of works from the Italian pair Daniele Iop and Manfred Bortoli, two of the genre’s most respected filmmakers. The Trip, a surreal odyssey that tracks two water molecules as they journey the great ocean currents of the world, recently won the Silver Prize at the Marseille Festival of Underwater Images; and the breathtaking The Giant and The Fisherman (pictured, right), which captures the interaction between Indonesian fishermen and the whale sharks of Cenderawasih Bay.

At the Sydney screening, audiences were particularly engaged by Englishman Ben Finney’s And Then We Swam (featured, below), the hugely entertaining story of two adventure seeking Brits who set out to row the 3500 miles of open water between Australia’s western coast and the island of Mauritius. In addition to being a funny and thrilling study of the human spirit, their journey captures the physical scale and emotional scope of mankind’s relationship with the ocean.

It is a broad selection reflective of the many aspects of man’s co-existence with the sea and its surrounds. Jemima Robinson knew the greatest hurdle she had to overcome was the perception that the Ocean Film Festival would be a greenie love-in. “Having attended a number of ocean environment events in the past I often had the feeling that they were preaching to the converted,” she says. “We really wanted to break from this mould and make the OFFA accessible and enjoyable to everyone, even someone who has never set foot in the ocean. Rather than showing a program full of problems, we aimed to show a program full of inspiration, that would make our audiences fall in love with the ocean.”

Robinson hopes that audiences will take from her festival a fresh perspective on this increasingly unsustainable imbalance between modern man and open water. Despite the breadth of issues raised and the consummate artistry on display in the programme, Robinson acknowledges that, “the message was always the same - there is a problem, this is the problem, this is how you can be involved in the solution.”

The Ocean Film Festival Australia has four engagements left of its 2014 Australian season before undertaking a European tour. Full details can be found at the festival’s official website.