TIFF 2024: ‘The Last of the Sea Women’ Dives Head-First Into the Work of a Fierce but Dwindling Community

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | September 11, 2024 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | September 11, 2024 |

On Jeju Island, off the coast of South Korea, a group of women rule the ocean. They are haenyeo, or ‘women of the sea,’ a unique kind of female diver who harvest sea life like mollusks and urchins to sell as food. This is a uniquely woman-dominated field, but it’s also a dying one. As younger generations say no to this tough and dangerous kind of work, the vast majority of haenyeo left working are over the age of 50. This is their calling, their way of life, and it’s being threatened by growing environmental disasters.

The Last of the Sea Women, directed by Sue Kim (who first encountered the haenyeo when visiting Korea as a child), has a beautiful story at its heart. While the haenyeo have been the focus of many a K-drama (and TIFF 2023 action-comedy Smugglers), they’ve largely been period pieces that captured the community at its peak, when tens of thousands of young women and their female elders ruled the roost. Nowadays, the haenyeo is a swindling breed with an ageing population. It only makes it more remarkable when Kim’s camera follows these grandmothers into the ocean. They can hold their breath for minutes at a time, sinking gracefully to the seafloor to cut mussels and sea urchins from the bedrock. While the dangers are obvious and discussed frequently, the haenyeo make it look so effortless in underwater shots that verge on the surreal. You can see why they’re often described as mermaids.

We hear from several women, part of this tight knit community where they once stood as societal outsiders. Being a haenyeo was seen as an undesirable occupation for a woman in search of a husband. This was grunt work to skeptics but for the haenyeo, it was something far grander than a mere job. ‘I’m happy in the ocean no matter what I make,’ says one woman. Others talk about the serenity of their time in the water, diving and surfacing for hours at a time while the world goes by. If the entire documentary was just footage of their dives, it’d be 90 minutes well spent.

But it’s the community they’ve formed that truly matters. These women, the oldest of whom is in her 80s, have a deep connection with one another as well as their natural surroundings that younger generations don’t want or need. They’re charming, frequently mocking one another, and proud of what they do. We see a school or training new haenyeo but the (male) head admits that only a tiny percentage of attendees go on to become professionals. One rare exception is a pair of Busan women in their 30s who have turned their haenyeo work into a social media phenomenon. Even one of them admits she doesn’t want her daughter to follow in her footsteps. One of the most affecting out-of-water moments comes when the two generations of haenyeo meet and the elders are so thrilled to discover they have descendants (and yes, they do immediately try to set up their sons with the one single woman.)

This film is also an environmental call to action. Rising sea temperatures are killing off sea life and introducing new species to regions that were previously unlivable to them. Their earnings are dwindling alongside their catches. The existential threat of climate change becomes more terrifying with the news that the Japanese government plans to dump diluted radioactive wastewater from the Fukushima plant meltdown into the ocean. The authorities say that it’s all technically safe, but for women who make their living swimming in such tides, how could this be viewed as anything less than a death sentence?

The haenyeo are forced to become activists. They meet with anti-nuclear campaigners who largely talk of the disaster in big-scale terms. Protests are held in Jeju and beyond. One haenyeo goes all the way to Geneva to give a statement on behalf of her community (her speech is short but forceful, given in English which she has learned phonetically for the benefit of the Human Rights Council.) It’s less thrilling to watch as an audience member than the underwater scenes, but Kim smartly keeps the focus small and to these women. The very personal scale of climate change’s insidious impact, especially on women and communities of colour, remains under-discussed. For the haenyeo, the water is work, family, tradition, and so much more. To poison their ecosystem is to lead to the extinction of their very history.

The Last of the Sea Women is a sturdy and impeccably warm documentary with a simple assignment: to show you the human cost of environmental disaster and to care about the marginalized communities most directly impacted by it. By the end of this film, you’re ready to march on the streets with the haenyeo, and root for them to continue their great work for generations to come.

The Last of the Sea Women had its world premiere at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. It will debut exclusively on Apple TV+ on October 11.