Finis Terræ

Four fishermen have made camp for three months on Bannec, a small island off the Brittany coast, gathering seaweed, burning it in heaps, and waiting to sell the ash. There is nobody else out there and the mainland is hard to reach. When a small cut on one man's thumb turns septic, that isolation stops being scenery and becomes the whole problem. Jean Epstein shot it in 1929 on the island itself with real fishermen and no actors at all. In the last years of silent cinema it is an early and important attempt at mixing documentary with fiction. The sea is not the backdrop here, it is the event: a man's life comes down to a few hours between the weather and the tide.