The Last of the Sea Women review – female Korean divers as picturesque eco-feminist tradition

Sue Kim’s film about South Korea’s underwater fishers has everything from nuclear pollution to sexism to cover, but sticks to bland reportage

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.

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