A Custom of the Sea (2021)

• 68%
• 2021
• Documentary
• Fabrizio Polpettini

Porto Maurizio, where the director, who lives in France today, grew up, is located on the Ligurian coast. The village is the starting point for a cinematic journey into the past that spans a surprisingly wide arc to a time when Muslim pirates, the corsairs, haunted the Mediterranean and took Europeans as slaves. To this end, the film light-handedly draws from the rich fund of film history and its iconography. Adventure films from the 1940s and historical murals depict the naval battles of the early 19th century in powerful images. The director ingeniously combines such visual finds with analogue new recordings of a journey with two friends. Their seemingly loosely told anecdotes and chance encounters combine to form a coherent whole, forming a geopolitical system of coordinates around the Mediterranean that deals with eurocentrism, colonial history and religiously motivated conflicts between Christian and Islamic countries. The subjects couldn't be more topical.