Sailing a Sinking Sea: Exploring the Culture of the Moken People

Sailing a Sinking Sea is a feature-length experimental documentary exploring the culture of the Moken people of Burma and Thailand. The Moken are a seafaring community and one of the smallest ethnic minority groups in Asia, traditionally spending eight months out of the year in thatch-roofed wooden boats. Wholly reliant upon the sea, their entire belief system revolves around water.

Sailing a Sinking Sea weaves a visual and aural tapestry of Moken mythologies and present-day practices. As a viewer you will swim under the sea past fishes and mermaids, sail boats across turquoise waters, land on 13 different islands, step inside sea shanties on stilts, delve into the minds of shamans, become possessed through the worship of sea gods, dance between lovers and emerge drenched in Moken mythology.

"This loving impressionistic tribute is [...] an outlier in contemporary cinema, springing as it does from the 1930s ethnographic cinema of Robert Flaherty as well as the later visions of Jean Rouch in the '60s and Robert Gardner (who's cited in the credits) in the '70s and '80s."
-- Carson Lund, Slant Magazine

Chicago Underground Film Festival, Chicago, IL, 2015
Rural Route Film Festival, Museum of the Moving Image, New York, NY, 2015
Environmental Film Festival, Australia, 2015

Running Time

66 mins

Year

2015

Kanopy ID

1176578

Filmmakers

Olivia Wyatt

Languages

Burmese, Moken, Southern Thai, Thai

Subjects

Social Sciences > Anthropology

Global Studies & Languages > Asian Studies

Documentaries > Politics & Current Affairs

Global Studies & Languages > Indigenous Studies

Documentaries

Watch now

Comments (1)

Anonymous

Boston University•2 years ago

Breathtaking. Such a great way to convey the experience of a culture: through their own myths. Love the sound design too! So immersive.

Documentary Educational Resources

The carved pillars of the matrilineal Amis tribe's famed ancestral house recount tribal legends such as The Great Flood and The Glowing Girl, and are home to the ancestral spirits of the Amis. The pillars, however, were removed from the village for exhibition in Taiwan's Institute of Ethnology Museum after…

Documentary Educational Resources

In many ways the heart of indigenous India, mineral-rich Jharkhand is and has been at the core of India's industrial development after independence. There, the indigenous Adivasi people have borne the brunt of what is arguably India's most fundamental developmental conflict, which has pushed them to the verge of extinction…

Documentary Educational Resources

Cremation rites are the most elaborate rites of passage performed by Balinese householders. Poor families may wait years before accumulating enough resources to cremate their dead, who are buried in the meantime. In 1978 many more cremations than usual were carried out because of the great purification cermony, Eka Dasa…

National Film and Sound Archive of Australia

Our Asian Neighbours is a series of films that aims to convey everyday life in Asia and promote greater understanding of often complex societies. This series is devoted to Thailand and brings to life its people and their culture. Each program captures the lifestyle of a different individual in their…

Part of the Series: Yangon Film School

A tire recycling workshop in South Okkalapa in Myanmar's former capital of Yangon is a site of multiple uses and multiple deaths, for this is the place where defunct tires are transformed from their original shape and use, and are reborn into new and completely different lives. Filmed almost entirely…

Jeanne Hallacy

Into the Current takes the viewer into the darkest corners of Burma's massive system of repression. The ordeal of political prisoners like Ko Bo Kyi illuminates the suppression of democracy activists through imprisonment, torture and isolation, but more importantly, the resolute commitment they embody for a people long denied their…

Ronin Films

Ross Dunkley is a mix of pragmatism and idealism: he is a free speech warrior prepared to do business in a country dominated by the dead hand of the military dictatorship. Originally, influential liberals supported Dunkley's newspaper because they wanted reform but four years later a hardline crackdown saw his…

Documentary Educational Resources

While once a dormant issue in Thailand, the inability to gain citizenship has developed into a problem that affects over 400,000 people in its low-income mountain regions. Recognizing citizenship among a nation is a basic human right, however the people of the mountain region - referred to as "Hill Tribes"…

National Film and Sound Archive of Australia

In 1943, Allied prisoners of war and Asian conscripts began working on the construction of the Thai-Burma railway. By the time it was completed, more than 100,000 men had died. On Anzac Day more than 40 years later, a group of ex-servicemen from Australia, the United Kingdom and Holland returned…

Documentary Educational Resources

The Balinese cremation ceremony, or ngaben, has primarily been known in the West as either a major tourist attraction that dazzles visitors with the splendor, intricacy, and drama of its performance, or as fodder for long-standing anthropological arguments about personhood and emotion on the island that debated whether or not…

Part of the Series: Asian Insight

Thailand has never known colonial rule. The Thai people are their own masters. There is little evidence of the kind of social organisations that modern western societies have found necessary to develop. This program attempts to analyse the mechanisms that hold Thailand together and examine the historical and cultural background…

Music Box Films

Visionary director Werner Herzog takes viewers on yet another unforgettable journey into remote and extreme natural landscapes in HAPPY PEOPLE. A visually stunning documentary about the people living in the heart of the Siberian Taiga. Deep in the wilderness, far away from civilization, 300 people inhabit the small village of…

Sailing a Sinking Sea: Exploring the Culture of the Moken People

Documentary Educational Resources

Documentary Educational Resources

Comments (1)

Related videos

PARENTAL CONTROLS

Your parental controls are ON. Please enter your pin.