WALKING FISH

observational, perspectival, and “operational” Point of view

A hallucinatory journey through the sci-fi world of contemporary aquaculture, Walking Fish evokes a space of human/animal hybrids, cybernetic killing machines, and the death of the traditional fishery.

What does fishing look like with no sea and no fishermen? 

Walking Fish is a documentary film, a hallucinatory journey into the world of contemporary aquaculture in the North Atlantic. The film follows the points of view of several key species - oysters, mussels, and salmon - on their seed-to-table voyages in New England and the Netherlands, depicting their spawning, rearing, harvesting, and consumption. In doing so, Walking Fish elucidates a complex and often sublime assemblage of human labor, animals, and machinery while the industry slides toward automation and the doomsday clock of climate change threatens to run out.

Cultural and technological shifts loom large on the horizon. Modern aquaculture ruptures the old rhythms of fishing, supplanting them with a cycle that is more complex, even inscrutable to the casual observer. Walking Fish demystifies this cycle in three distinct chapters, leading the viewer from the current state of the art to the future of fish. 

The opening act takes place at sea, in a world largely indistinguishable from traditional fishing. Oysters are harvested by hand in a tranquil estuary; mussels are separated from their ropes by a small crew. But soon, the film drifts to a floating salmon farm, where the specter of new technology first appears. The salmon’s feeding habits are diligently tracked by cameras. When harvest day arrives, they are sucked from net pens in a giant tube that ends in the fish guillotine.

In the second chapter, we visit the warehouses and processing facilities where laborers work to pack and prepare each species for market. At first glance, this too seems like familiar work, but as the chapter progresses from salmon fileting to automated mussel sorting and fish grading performed by the eye of a machine, the film begins to show the profound changes afoot. Adaptation, it turns out, will involve greater machine agency, working in concert with a labor force composed of farmers and scientists rather than fishermen. 

Our third act enters the hatcheries and laboratories that give birth to the organisms, where the work of genetic selection, rearing, and optimization first begins. Researchers in Wageningen build an AI phenotyper to identify the best broodstock; USDA workers in Maine manually inseminate eggs selected for disease resistance; an infrared spectrometer evaluates the presence of sufficient fatty acids in filets. By the film’s end, fish and shellfish are raised in completely closed, land-based systems, isolated from a nature that is no longer a hospitable habitat.

If adaptation means learning to live with climate change, these methods of rearing give us a technological preview of a world to come, a world at once wondrous and harrowing. Together, these chapters form not just a linear trajectory, but a loop that is ever repeating and expanding. 

We enter the loop at the point of harvest, and exit at the current state of the art in hatcheries and labs. The strength of this approach is that it places the most advanced technology at the end. This creates a foreshadowing, with implications not only for aquaculture, but for other industries adapting to a changing climate and global economy. While many films on the fishery opt for nostalgic portraits of bygone eras and lost livelihoods, Walking Fish peers into the decades ahead, asking instead: when the oceans warm and humanity rears fish on land instead of at sea, what will the fisheries look like? Will they even be recognizable to the fishermen of yesteryear?

Topic Summary: Aquaculture in the 21st Century

Across the globe, fish stocks have plateaued, decimated by overfishing and ocean acidification. Quotas and conservation efforts have met with some limited success, but even the best management systems can do little to mitigate the effects of climate change. Rising temperatures have pushed many species (notably, lobster) northward into colder water, while shell builders struggle to form shells as more CO₂ enters the water. 

Into this gulf steps a new generation of fishermen who are not, in fact, fishing: they are farming. From its pioneers in the Netherlands to the operators of New England net pens, the fishery is being quietly reformulated by human, animal, and AI actors. Aquaculture is reshaping a cultural heritage, a way of life, and the food on our plates.

In the 21st century, aquaculture production has continued to rise, year over year, to meet increasing global demand for marine protein. Whereas fishing fleets harnessed technology to hunt down more fish, aquaculture places its hopes on efficient production, maximizing yields and minimizing risk from the fertilization of the egg to the nutritional content of the finished product. This focus on animal husbandry marks a split from fishing, from hunting to rearing. And although the early instantiations of aquaculture are at sea, there is an inexorable move toward land-based systems, where the environment can be even more tightly controlled.

In a world that has accepted climate change as fait accompli, efforts that change the very fabric of society will be necessary in order to survive - be it in housing, transportation, or traditional trades like fishing. Aquaculture has certain remedial benefits (shellfish, for instance, can reduce ocean acidification locally and create natural storm barriers), but it is primarily a future-oriented industry already responding to global climate pressures. Here in the Netherlands, adaptation has taken on an urgent quality, with some researchers calling for forms of managed retreat and a return of western farmlands back to wetlands. The Netherlands often serves as a laboratory for the world, where various environmental prototypes are constantly developed and deployed.

Visual Approach and Production Timeline

Walking Fish is an observational, visceral journey that embeds viewers in the perspectives of humans, animals, and machines. These perspectives are intertwined as the viewer travels across the essential spaces of production and consumption - a visual topography of the industry and its future orientation. To achieve this, we employ cinematography techniques using underwater cameras, drones, and screen captures of machines at work, maximizing the various embodied points of view. These experiential shots are interspersed with observational imagery, static shots along production lines and of laborers at sea.

Our production is divided into two phases, the first of which is in New England and the second of which is in the Netherlands. The first phase covers the operations at sea, as well as some processing and rearing activities, while the second phase is dedicated to the genesis of new technologies. To date, we have completed the production phase in New England. Now, we are developing the latter phase here in the Netherlands. In effect, we have covered the downstream part of the process, and have moved upstream, to the source. 

In New England, we have worked with Cooke Aquaculture, Nonesuch Oysters, Mook Sea Farms, Bangs Island Mussels, Acadia and the USDA, among others. In the Netherlands, we plan to shoot with land-based farm Kingfish Zeeland in collaboration with Wageningen University and Research, where a team of researchers led by Dr. Jochen Hemming is testing a stereoscopic phenotyping device. Zeeland is also home to many oyster farmers whose collaboration we will seek out - the region is an ideal microcosm of the most advanced and traditional techniques existing side by side. We will also explore WUR’s role in the broader AquaIMPACT project, an EU initiative, and its implications for the future of maritime labor.

The Netherlands production will provide us with some of the most intriguing and otherworldly imagery - the camera eye that tracks, sorts, and even evaluates fish on its own. One of the most fascinating aspects of this film from a cinematography standpoint is the importance of optics and video technology to make all of the systems work - the farmers and scientists are, in effect, harnessing the power of cinema (coupled with AI) to do their work. Yet the images they harvest are not representational; they are operational, tailor-made for a purpose. Infrared, stereoscopy, and high speed cameras all play a role in this new image regime.

Team

Nathan Saucier is a filmmaker, cinematographer, and installation designer based in Utrecht. He has created work for organizations like Non-Event, Open Documentary Lab, MIT Media Lab, List Visual Arts Center, Harvard CAMLab, The Guardian, and Institute of Time. He was recently awarded a fellowship at the Film Study Center at Harvard University to develop his forthcoming documentary on aquaculture and climate, Walking Fish. Nathan studied the changing nature of the automated image in his master’s thesis Operational Images and the Interpretive Turn, completed at MIT, where he also studied VR game design and color science. He holds an SM in Comparative Media Studies from MIT and a BA in Film and Electronic Arts from Bard College. He has worked as an educator on three continents, teaching the fundamentals of nonfiction filmmaking and immersive design.

Fırat Sezgin is a producer working in Film and in New Media with a background in producing feature length films as well as documentaries. After graduation from Emerson College (2011) with a BA in Producing for Film, he returned to Istanbul where he worked in different positions in various productions. In his last five years in Istanbul he joined the largest Turkish studio BKM, where he worked in national and international licensing & distribution as well as more than 20 co-productions. He co-founded Institute of Time to work on independent projects including 3 feature creative documentaries. His last VR work Floodplain premiered in Venice Film Festival. His latest documentary co-production world premiered in the IFFR 2020. He now resides in the Netherlands. He is one of the Emerging Producers selected by Jihlava international Documentary FF 2020 as well as IFFR producers lab in 2021. He was also selected to participate in the immersive storytelling workshop organized by Netherlands Film Fonds & Torino Film Lab in 2020 and Close-up in 2021.