Athens International Film + Video Festival / Full Frame 2019 – The Blessed Assurance
Every winter off the Georgia coast, fishermen reel in jellyfish from the same waters where shrimp once flourished. The Blessed Assurance is a sensorial documentary experience, a meditation on livelihood exploring both man and jellyfish in the otherworldly ecosystem found on an American trawl boat. Visceral images and sounds immerse us in a primordial world, decentering the human and even going inside a jellyfish.
Interview with Director Isabelle Carbonell
Congratulations! Why did you make your film?
Slippery, wild, and unpredictable, jellyfish bloom all over the world in volatile ways as a result of the unintended consequences of the “Anthropocene”: the age of man. With a background in environmental science, I became interested in jellyfish as a working metaphor for the Anthropocene. Jellyfish are primordial, nearly 598 million years old, a fact hinting that they just might outlive homo sapiens. In searching for sites of human-jellyfish interactions, I have found them in nearly every part of the globe, and I decided to start with the southeast of the United States before moving farther afield. What I discovered in profiling the small town of Darien, Georgia, was not just jellyfish but a microcosm of American racial politics and history under the pull of globalization. Hinted at in the film but nevertheless, an important backdrop is the dense, interconnected web of cause and effect revolving around the decline of shrimp.
This film is one of several works I’ve completed focusing on themes of environmental disaster, water, and the possibility of life in capitalist ruins (Tsing 2015), a growing body of work I’m creating that falls loosely under the term I call a “cinema of the Anthropocene”.
Imagine I’m a member of the audience. Why should I watch this film?
If you want a sensorial immersion into another world, beyond-the-human into jellyfish, take a seat. If you've ever wondered where your seafood comes from, and the hard work it takes to get it, take a seat. If you've ever had any curiosity about the high seas, and what might happen when we turn to jellyfish for food, take a seat. If you want to see an experimental documentary film which takes risks both physically and conceptually, made by female filmmakers with no funding, take. a. seat.
How do personal and universal themes work in your film?
A deep precarity faces us in this time of the Anthropocene, the rapidly accelerating and accumulative environmental damage caused by this so-called "age of man". By "us" I mean both humans and more-than-humans, both captains of former shrimp boats scrabbling to make a living, and jellyfish caught in currents and fishing nets, and all the interwoven lives in between which are at risk.
How have the script and film evolved over the course of their development?
Beyond subject matter, the style and cinematography of the film are representative of the work I’ve developed by thinking visually and sonically beyond the human, decentering the Anthropos in both perspective and voice while trying to reveal new knowledge not otherwise possible by traditional documentary methods. I’ve developed what I call the “panesthetic interview,” which is a type of interview technique that uses all the senses at once. I spotlight not just the human drama of being a shrimp fisherman learning how to trawl for jellyfish, but the ecosystem created on the boat itself from any vantage point I could imagine. “Drowning” inside the hold with the jellyfish, we listen through a hydrophone to the jellyfish soup sloshing there and enter their very bodies via an endoscopic camera. Thus we immerse ourselves in visceral experiences which unlock possibilities of thinking through both human and nonhuman perspectives.
For post-production of the film, my editor Sarah Cannon and I agreed on a durational, nonhuman dominant narrative from the start. Sarah and I have worked together for many years, and she was essential in balancing a series of discrete narrative arcs (the backbone of the film) with the more surreal, nonhuman explorations.
What type of feedback have you received so far?
Traditional documentary norms have encouraged some very narrow stylistic choices: for example, a three-part narrative arc, talking-heads, conflict, with a call-to-action at the end. When people see our film, it steps outside of many of these traditional approaches, not to mention also focusing on a subject matter that isn't only human! This has challenged viewers in a good way, and much of our feedback is in the form of surprise, deep thinking, and delight. This film will make you feel, and it will make you think, but not in the ways you're used to.
Has the feedback surprised or challenged your point of view?
Nope. Come surprise us!
What are you looking to achieve by having your film more visible on www.wearemovingstories.com?
Exactly what you write in the question: making the film more visible.
Who do you need to come on board (producers, sales agents, buyers, distributors, film festival directors, journalists) to amplify this film’s message?
Listen, I'm good at making the art. Nothing after that. So: distributors and journalists, come holler.
What type of impact and/or reception would you like this film to have?
The film isn't made to be an intervention in just content but also the filmmaking approach. The film should help open up a new way for documentary films to tell environmental stories in this urgent long-now that we find ourselves in.
What’s a key question that will help spark a debate or begin a conversation about this film?
Would you eat jellyfish if nothing else were left in our oceans?
What other projects are the key creatives developing or working on now?
Isabelle has just finished two other projects: The Camel Race (2018), a more-than-human sensorial experience in four takes of the sport of camel racing in Qatar, complete with robot jockeys; and The River Runs Red (2018), an award-winning interactive documentary exploring Brazil's worst environmental disaster, and the world's largest tailings spill ever recorded. She is working on two more: 1) a PhD dissertation about invasive jellyfish blooms in the Adriatic Sea and 2) The Blessed Assurance is part of a feature-length production to come out next year.
Interview: March 2019
We Are Moving Stories embraces new voices in drama, documentary, animation, TV, web series, music video, women's films, LGBTQIA+, POC, First Nations, scifi, supernatural, horror, world cinema. If you have just made a film - we'd love to hear from you. Or if you know a filmmaker - can you recommend us? More info: Carmela
The Blessed Assurance
Every winter off the Georgia coast, fishermen reel in jellyfish from the same waters where shrimp once flourished. The Blessed Assurance is a sensorial documentary experience, a meditation on livelihood exploring both man and jellyfish in the otherworldly ecosystem found on an American trawl boat. Visceral images and sounds immerse us in a primordial world, decentering the human and even going inside a jellyfish.
Length: 21:30
Director: Isabelle Carbonell
Producer: Isabelle Carbonell and Sarah Cannon
About the writer, director and producer:
ISABELLE CARBONELL is a Belgian-Uruguayan-American award-winning documentary filmmaker and a PhD Candidate in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her work lies at the intersection of expanded documentary, environmental anthropology and the Anthropocene while striving to develop new visual and sonic approaches and methods to rethink documentary filmmaking.
Key cast: Cannonball jellyfish, Wynn Gale.
Looking for: sales agents, journalists, distributors, film festival directors, buyers
Twitter: @izacafilm
Instagram: @izacafilm
Other: VIMEO
Funders: Self-funded
Where can I watch it next and in the coming month? Big Sky Documentary Film Festival/Missoula, MN - Feb 21 &22; International Ocean Film Festival/San Fran, CA - March 9; Athens International Film + Video Festival/Athens, OH - April 8-14; Single Frame/ Durham, NC - April 7 with hopefully many more yet to be confirmed....