There is an important subject at the centre of this documentary from Korean-American film-maker Sue Kim, co-produced by Malala Yousafzai, but the film is finally let down by a bland and supercilious way of celebrating the women involved as a picturesque eco-feminist folk tradition, without actually tackling the hard questions their work is raising. They are the haenyeo of South Korea’s Jeju Island, women sea-divers who for generations have been swimming down to the ocean floor (without oxygen tanks) to harvest seafood. In the early 1960s, there were approximately 30,000 of them, now there are only about 3,200, mostly in their 60s; they are a tough, courageous, hardworking crew doing a job that men abandoned because it was too arduous. In 2016, Unesco officially inscribed the haenyeo work on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity because of their focus on sustainability. But the haenyeo say their tradition is dying out and the sea in which they work is dying, too, poisoned by pollution and climate crisis.
So … are the haenyeo dying out? Well, one says here that younger women are asking why they can’t use oxygen tanks. A fair question, which, exasperatingly, the film doesn’t really answer. Working without them is presumably a more profitable business model, and use of oxygen tanks is arguably to be avoided because it might facilitate a more industrialised, invasive and destructive harvesting process. But this question is left untouched in the film. Two younger haenyeo are interviewed, women in their 30s, who have ingeniously and likably used social media to publicise their work. They are now celebrities – but have they reversed the decline? What are the statistics? Again, we aren’t told.
And then, most importantly of all: the ecological disaster in which, notoriously, the Japanese government permitted the release into Korean waters of radioactively contaminated water from the earthquake-damaged Fukushima plant, on the (debatable) grounds that they had treated the water, making it safe. With the support of Greenpeace, the women passionately band together to protest this outrage. One comes to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva and makes a heartfelt speech. And then … ? Well, you can spend the final few minutes of this film tensely longing for some final decision on the all-important Fukushima issue. But no. There is silence.
The film finally, blandly veers away from the whole question in favour of images of haenyeo smilingly doing their work, for all the world as if the Fukushima disaster didn’t happen. (The Japanese government appear to have gone ahead with the release of a second batch of water.) The haenyeo may well be angry, but their anger isn’t represented here.
• The Last of the Sea Women is on Apple TV+ from 11 October.
