Against the Tide (dir Sarvnik Kaur, 2023)

Winner of the Sundance 2023 Vérité Filmmaking Prize, this captivating documentary of class, climate change, and overfishing centres on the lives of two indigenous fishermen. Best friends Rakesh and Ganesh both grew up in the Koli caste, both entered their traditional profession as fishermen, and both are struggling to provide for their young families. They face common problems: bureaucratic rules, plastic ocean garbage, high-tech Chinese fishing fleets, an overpopulation of jellyfish, and, most ominous of all, fish stocks depleted due to climate change. But in some crucial ways they are completely different. Rakesh has always been poor; Ganesh could afford to go to school abroad. Rakesh uses his father’s rickety boat and navigates by the moon and the tides; Ganesh has a power boat and prefers newer, innovative methods, like shining LED lights into the water to lure fish at night. Tension builds between the friends; how could it not, whenever tradition and modernity clash?

Screens with two shorts – Co-Creating with Nature: The Art of Circular Design (The Climate Tribe, 2024: 9 min) in which designer Reema Al Mheirii talks eloquently about her heritage and her mission to redefine waste, a process which has led her to repurpose discarded fish scales into a regenerative biomaterial from which she makes architectural floor lamps; and Wrought
(dir Anna Sigrithur and Joel Penner, Canada, 2022: 22 min), a time-lapse film of rotting and fermentation in action to create an intimate, immersive world where decay can be beautiful, tender and even surprisingly human.

This programme is part of the Al Sidr Environmental Film Festival, a collaboration between NYUAD and Environment Agency – Abu Dhabi