Two coasts, four fishermen and one bad season. A feature-length documentary about small-boat fishing as the catch moves further out each year.
Low Water follows four fishermen through a single season, two working a lagoon in central Vietnam and two on the Sea of Marmara, and lets the parallels emerge without narration. Annelise spent the first month on each coast without a camera, fishing with them before asking to film.
Priya Natarajan shot from inside the boats on a small cinema camera with a single wide prime, so the framing is always at arm's length and the horizon is never level for long. Where we needed distance, a second boat followed with a long zoom. The black-and-white passages are night and early-morning sequences shot at high sensitivity, and we kept the grain rather than cleaning it up.
Tobias Wren recorded every haul with a hydrophone over the side, and the sound of nets coming in gave the film its structure. Freya Lund cut 140 hours of material down to forty-eight minutes over five months.
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