The azure waters teem with exotic fish, sea fans sway from jagged rocks. It could be yet another of the stories of the deep that captivate lovers of nature films — but something is wrong.
The violins are sawing too insistently. The threat is not the shadowy shark; the story is about to turn from natural history into unnatural horror.
Cinemagoers across the nation will shrink into their seats from Monday, on World Oceans Day, as the systematic devastation of the deep unfolds.
Bigger, more powerful, and more plentiful trawlers scrape clean every accessible patch of seabed. Companies out to please their shareholders fish only for immediate profit, exploiting every loophole to continue. Politicians, paralysed by the fear of angering the fishermen, are made complicit.
Lauded at the Sundance film festival as the Inconvenient Truth of the oceans, this documentary lifts the lid on what overfishing is doing to our seas. Just as it took Al Gore’s matter-of-fact delivery to bring home the threat of climate change, the impact of End of the Line seems destined to mark a seminal change in how we think of fishing and the oceans.
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