It was an otherwise typical day on 25 September 2021 when thousands of dead and dying crustaceans washed up on beaches in Yorkshire and the north-east of England. Early morning walkers and swimmers were aghast to find a sickening carpet of twitching, fitting crabs. It would be the first but not the last die-off, which would see the disappearance of vast swathes of integral native sea life along an extended stretch of coast, including seal pups.
It would also see the decimation of the local fishing industry and, with that, a way of life. Environmentalists, fishers and ordinary local people wondered what could have possibly caused such a rare catastrophic incident. Meanwhile, hours before – completely coincidentally, the authorities said – a major dredging operation was carried out in the mouth of the River Tees, disturbing sediment where decades earlier highly toxic pollutants from heavy industry had been pumped.
The authorities, after carrying out a series of their own tests, denied there was a causal link, blaming an algae bloom and then, later, a novel pathogen. But those who live and work around the Tees estuary disagreed. In All Rivers Spill Their Stories to the Sea, the critically acclaimed documentary film-maker Jeanie Finlay is not setting out to find out what killed the crabs and lobsters.
But what I can do is show the audience what that feels like.” To do so, Finlay followed Stan Rennie, a fisher off the Teesside coast, over four years. What emerges is not an investigation into what destroyed precious marine life along a whole coastline but a story about the people searching for those answers. And it has won critics over.
Mark Kermode called the film “a life-affirming treat – funny, poignant and profound”, and it was awarded early film festival gongs at Bristol and the Mediterrane. Rennie is, according to Tina Brown, “the next Mr Bates”, and much like the Horizon Post Office scandal, it is a story of ordinary working people whose livelihoods have been destroyed, who are doggedly trying to get to the truth amid cold, uncaring powers that be. In fact, it was the ITV series Mr Bates vs The Post Office that helped Finlay gain the trust of the group of jaded fishers, who by then had begun to believe nothing would change and resisted having their first meeting filmed.
They include Seahorse (2019), following Freddy McConnell, a transgender man who gave birth, and, the same year, a documentary following the filming of the final series of Game of Thrones, lauded by critics as better than the season it documented. But it was important too that Finlay is a local lass, having grown up in Stockton-on-Tees. When she first came across the story, it “made me think about the coastline that I knew and loved, the place that made me”.
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