How Deep Is Your Love

About this event

Our screening on 27 September will be followed by a q&a with director Eleanor Mortimor and editor Nicole Halova. Far out on the open sea, an expedition vessel travels toward one of the most remote regions on Earth, the Clarion–Clipperton Zone, twelve days from the nearest land. Here, darkness, silence, and immense depths conceal an unexplored universe. How Deep Is Your Love follows a group of marine biologists trying to understand life in this unknown world, while grappling with the question of whether their presence risks harming what they seek to protect. A visually hypnotic and deeply absorbing journey in which every discovery reshapes our understanding of the planet. Eleanor Mortimer has created a nature documentary like no other. How Deep Is Your Love weaves awe-inspiring footage of this breathtaking realm with a looming sense of urgency as mankind’s progress threatens to upend these delicate eco-systems. The Garden Cinema View: Eleanor Mortimer’s documentary is a fascinating, oddly calming, and somewhat concerning trip into the abyssal zone. The peculiar cadence of Mortimer’s own voiceover narration – somewhere between Mark Cousins and ASMR – takes a little time to adjust to, but it ultimately works quite well once she submerges into this watery unknown. The images she presents, taken almost 5km beneath the surface of the Pacific, are remarkable, and remarkably strange. An alien world inhabited by seemingly impossible creatures. There are, as yet unanswered, questions raised here about seabed mining, and the effects of extraction and exploitation – even as the materials are used for ‘clean’ industries. A film of novel images, and probably not for the thalassophobic viewer.