Sharks in a Changing Sea: Stories from the Depth and the People Who Know Them
Sharks in a Changing Sea (25 min, 4K) explores North Carolina’s vibrant dive culture and the deep local knowledge surrounding sand tiger sharks. Guided by conservation biologist Dr. Carol Price and longtime divers, the film captures a grassroots understanding built through hundreds of dives and decades of firsthand encounters. Shipwrecks in the “Graveyard of the Atlantic” have become nurseries for these charismatic but misunderstood predators. This is a love letter to the ocean, and to those who dive in, year after year.
Director’s Statement
Fifty years ago, in June 1975, Jaws was released. The film changed the way people saw sharks forever: as mindless predators lurking beneath the surface. Fear replaced curiosity; conservation took a backseat to sensationalism. Half a century later, on the same Atlantic coast, I found myself making a very different kind of shark film.
Sharks in a Changing Sea began as my Master's Project at Duke University. Advised by Dr. Carol Price (NC Aquariums/NCSU) and Dr. Grant Murray, I set out to document the local knowledge held by divers: observation-based, memory driven, and deeply tied to place. My original goal was purely academic: conduct qualitative interviews, support community science, and contribute to the Spot A Shark USA program. But things evolved quickly. I became the director, producer, scriptwriter, cinematographer, interviewer, and editor, all for the first time, because I realized how beautiful this story of coexistence truly is, and how deeply the world, in such a time of change, needs to see it.
Though I had experience with underwater photography, I had only ever seen a shark once. I didn’t expect to make a film. But this project pushed me to become a storyteller. It also made me realize that I had spent years inside two communities—the diving and academic worlds—that arguably hold the least fear or misunderstanding of sharks. It wasn’t until I started this project that I truly understood how powerful the “man-eater” myth still is in the public imagination.
There are long, deliberate underwater shots in this film, uninterrupted sequences meant to reflect the sharks as I saw them: curious, calm, and peaceful.
Previous films by major media outlets have featured sharks along this coastline, but only through a scientific or sensational lens. This film is different. It’s not just about sharks, it’s about people. This is the first shark documentary to center the voices of North Carolina’s diving community: people whose daily encounters with the ocean shape a nuanced, place-based understanding of marine life. The local knowledge captured in this documentary is rich, layered, and often invisible to traditional science. How we might meaningfully incorporate it into future conservation efforts is a question I’m still trying to answer.