SHARKS IN A CHANGING SEA

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

Fifty years ago, in June 1975, the blockbuster film Jaws was released. The film changed the way people saw sharks forever: as mindless predators lurking beneath the waves. Half a century later, on the same Atlantic coast, I found myself making a very different kind of shark film.

This film began as my Master's Project at Duke University. I originally planned to conduct interviews with North Carolina divers and explore how their long-term observations might support the community science program Spot A Shark USA. But when words like diving, photography, and sharks came together, they immediately sparked a much less academic thought: I wanted to make a shark documentary.

There was one obvious problem: I had never made a film before. In fact, almost everything that might have seemed routine to an experienced filmmaker became a problem I had to solve for the first time: from formulating interview questions to managing files in editing software. There were many moments when I genuinely had no idea whether the film would work at all. Even finding a title became one of those problems. Late one night, while sorting through hours of interviews, I began to realize that change was everywhere in this story. The collision of the Labrador Current and the Gulf Stream is carving the coastline, historic shipwrecks are transforming marine ecosystems, our knowledge base is increasing with more data and local wisdoms, and at a much larger scale, anthropogenic influences are reshaping the ocean as a whole. In this story, the only constant is change. That is how Sharks in a Changing Sea found its name.

I was changing, too.

Somewhat embarrassingly, despite six years of diving and underwater photography, I had barely encountered sharks myself. Yet I had never been particularly afraid of them. Making this film helped me realize why. I had spent years moving between two communities—the diving and academic worlds—sharks are generally understood very differently from the way they are portrayed in popular culture. I had taken that perspective for granted. Only through this project did I begin to understand how persistent the “man-eater” image remains in the public imagination, and how both storytelling and firsthand experience can shape the way we relate to wildlife. That realization influenced the visual language of the film. There are deliberately long and uninterrupted clips in this film, meant to recreate the privileged sense of calm and peace I felt while swimming alongside these sharks. 

I gradually understand that the film was never only about sharks. It was also about the people. The human dimension eventually became important enough so I added a subtitle: Stories from the Depths and the People Who Know These Waters. This is also how this film differs from many previous shark films. Many focus primarily on the animals themselves, through scientific discovery, spectacle, or danger. This film centers the voices of North Carolina’s diving community, whose rich and layered knowledge has been built through years of returning to the same waters. In that sense, the film becomes as much a portrait of a community as it is a portrait of sharks.

The project left me thinking about what we do with the knowledge that comes from lived experience. For me, that question sits at the intersection of my two roles. As a researcher, I am interested in how local knowledge can be meaningfully incorporated into policy and conservation. As a communicator, I am equally interested in how those experiences can reach a wider public to share that passion and build awareness. Perhaps that is the deeper “change” at the heart of the film: changing the ways we know the ocean. How science and storytelling might work together to accelerate that change is a question I am still trying to answer.