This year’s London Breeze Film Festival ran from 21-25 Oct. I am reviewing a handful of films from this year’s 11th edition, with its biggest in-cinema programme to date. On 24 Oct, the Festival presented the premiere of Rhapsody on the Outlaw Ocean, created, written and directed by William Segal and Ian Urbina. The film is produced and edited by Ben Blankenship, with music and lyrics by William Segal.
This deeply original film aims to highlight issues concerning the ocean by utilising surprising elements, such as animation and music, throughout. The stories are based on reporting at sea and on land by The Outlaw Ocean Project. A journalist seeks to follow a story, but finds barriers and inertia everywhere. As we listen to seven different tales from international waters, an entertaining approach opens up what might be drily educational themes. The changing animation styles and musical forms respond to each story, finding different ways to represent what conventional reporting might struggle to convey.
The first section, “The Maritime Merry-Go-Round”, explores murders outside of governmental jurisdiction that no one seems to care about. The reporter goes alone to sea to find stories that might otherwise remain invisible. But how do you communicate what happens out there, and get anyone back on land to care? The ocean is too big to fathom, and its distance makes it easy to ignore.
“Anywhere Else” highlights the stowaway and the process of rafting when the ship’s captain doesn’t want to pay the fee to send them home. The migrant, sick and starving on a raft, faces a desperate choice: the decision to join in a masquerade becomes a strategy for survival. The ocean offers the possibility of escape, but also the threat of disappearance. The title suggests that almost anywhere else might be preferable, even when the journey itself becomes a gamble with life.
Industrial processes out in the ocean are the subject of “Magic Pipe”. An accidental oil spill becomes a story; deliberate pollution does not. Toxic waste from a ship’s machinery enters the water, while a worker in Nigeria exchanges moral considerations for money. White exploitation depends on Black workers doing the dirty work, the “grunts”. The system distributes both profit and responsibility unequally. Why does one environmental disaster attract attention while another remains unreported? Facts may be accurate, but is the mood or emotion wrong? Does objective reporting produce outrage, or can it leave us unmoved by the very things we need to understand?
By “Flithy Mouth”, we are being berated by a furious, rapping fish. He attacks plastic pollution, and notes that fishing nets account for 46 per cent of ocean litter. The song becomes a diss track, invading a man’s digital devices as the fish demands attention. The suggestion that America does not want to act on plastic pollution from Asia introduces another question: who is responsible, and who can afford to look away? Humour and absurdity turn the fish into an angry protagonist rather than a passive victim. Art is making an argument where facts alone may not be enough.
Rebecca Gomperts and Women on Waves use international waters to challenge restrictions on abortion, and their story informs “Twelve Miles Out”. Images of women, illegality and loss bring the human cost into view. The ship becomes both a means of providing access and a political statement, navigating legal boundaries through its registration and licensing. Classifying the ship as a work of art becomes part of this process, helping the project obtain licences. In Catholic Portugal’s elections, the conflict between “the unborn’s right to protection and a woman’s right to self-direction” exposes the competing claims at stake. Here, the ocean’s distance from national authority creates possibilities for resistance.
Highlighting the journalist’s role in shaping a story, “The Interview” highlights a modern slave, a Cambodian man who has been sold twice between Thai fishing ships. Trapped by debt and the need to provide for his family, his testimony exposes the mechanics of modern slavery. How do you communicate trauma without turning the interview itself into another form of manipulation? “The wall was all scratch” is a fragment that suggests an experience difficult to contain in words.
The final section, “Gods of Men”, considers how outlaws maintain order when the ocean is too big to govern, when “Bad things happen because they can.” When governments fail to intervene, other outlaws become the force that stops them. A pirate ship acting in the name of peace presents a paradoxical form of justice in a world with “no law, no God”. “Fear is when you want to control what you can’t control.” As the pirates surrender, their boat sinks, and their faces become those of fish. Human authority appears fragile beside an environment that cannot be controlled.
Rhapsody of the Outlaw Ocean urges us to rethink how we view the ocean in order to move away from bad metaphors to those that suggest wonder, knowledge and shared responsibility rather than limitless exploitation. The film cannot make everything comprehensible, but it can change how we encounter what remains hidden. Journalism provides evidence and exposes abuses; art tries to make that evidence matter.
The film asks whether changing our metaphors can change our behaviour. The journalist’s task is not simply to report facts, but to find ways of communicating them that make a response possible. Making the invisible visible is only the beginning of change.
Each section has its own credits, from the singers (Brandon Victor Dixon, Sydney James Harcourt, Betsy Struxness, Lexi Lawson, Thayne Jasperson and Aubrey Toone) to the animators (Amalia Lage, Yukai Du, Chiara Sgatti, Vier Nev, Joe Baughman, George Summers, Myungeun Kim and Boris Wilmot). Their different styles add significant interest to the subject.
This is an essential window into the work of The Outlaw Ocean Project, a non-profit journalism organization based in Washington, DC that produces investigative stories about human rights, labor, and environmental concerns on the two-thirds of the planet covered by water.
Rhapsody of the Outlaw Ocean was at London Breeze Film Festival and is due for a wider release for all next year.