"Squid fleet" - Get into a Strange World that few Outsiders Get to See

China has the world’s largest distant-water fishing fleet, catching billions of pounds of seafood annually, the biggest portion of it squid.

The fleet is rife with labor trafficking, abusive working conditions, and violence. But China publicly releases little information about its vessels, and most stay at sea for more than a year, making them difficult to track or inspect.

To see the fleet up close, Ian Urbina and documentary directors Ed Ou and Will N. Miller travelled to fishing grounds near the Falkland Islands and the Galápagos. They chased boats, interviewed crews by radio, and, when permitted, boarded ships. The goal was to talk to crew members and chronicle their working conditions.

“Squid Fleet” offers something deeper. It is a hybrid documentary, combining fictionalized narration with real footage from the trip to capture a strange world that few outsiders get to see.

Squid fields feel industrial, because so many large ships, sometimes hundreds of them, concentrate their work within a fifty-mile radius. At night, when most squid fishing happens, the blackness stretches in all directions, like outer space. The ships use extremely bright bulbs, which can be seen from miles away, to attract squid to the surface. Spending time in such a place is disorienting, like standing on a radar map with blips of light on all sides.

It can become difficult to situate yourself—to discern whether you are in the center of the fishing grounds or on their outer edge.

Onboard, virtually every surface is coated in oozy ink. Generators roar and jigs clang. The film conjures this sensory overload.

The narrator in the film is a fictional young man from China, who recalls the stories that his father, a squid fisherman, has told him about life at sea. The stories are derived partly from court records, labor contracts, and dozens of conversations with crew members.