This sterling directorial debut is an unusual, sensitive and personal tribute to the director’s parents. Unable to communicate with his father, but wishing to find a connection, the filmmaker seizes his father’s fishing lines and joins the crew of a snoek boat. Failing miserably as a fisherman, he poetically captures the chores, rituals, uncertainty and dignity of a hard life on the open ocean. He also delicately presents the despair the subsistence fishing community of Kalk Bay feels as globalisation, government policy and commercial operations leave them high and dry.

Hendricks’ emotional eulogy offers a personal conversation to his parents, by bringing to light the hardened reality of an increasingly marginalised fishing community at the very tip of Africa.