DUTCH HARBOR: WHERE THE SEA BREAKS ITS BACK
Dutch Harbor: Where the Sea Breaks Its Back
Braden King and Laura Moya, 1998
Catalog No.: FTF-012
Length: 80 minutes
“It was a really good life until the last three years.” To watch Dutch Harbor is to bear a kind of witness, for this independent documentary is an elegy; the poetic anthropology of a passing. As others before them, filmmakers Braden King and Laura Moya went to Dutch Harbor, Alaska – the most westerly point of the United States – to trace the edge of things and to move beyond paved roads toward blurred horizons of sea, sky and rock. They returned from this Aleutian Island port and its multi-million dollar industry built on the migrations of Bering Sea crab with an edge vision of obsession, decline and elemental beauty. Set to an improvised score of crystalline precision by Michael Krassner and the Boxhead Ensemble, the film’s images preserve and celebrate the fiercely independent spirit of a completely unique community and landscape in a meditative exploration of “the last place to go.”
– Gareth Evans, London Film Festival
Directed by Braden King and Laura Moya
Cinematography by Mark Hopkins
Original Music by The Boxhead Ensemble
Festivals: International Film Festival Rotterdam
PRESS
“A wonderfully spare and evocative portrait of a fishing town perched on the frigid northern edge of the U.S.... With its WPA-meets-alt.rock sensibility, Dutch Harbor provides that lingering frontier with an elegy that’s hard-bitten and haunting.”
- New York Press
“Rarely has the relationship between sound and image been so deeply explored.”
– Chicago Tribune