The Last of the Sea Women (2024)

The-Last-of-the-Sea-Women-(2024)
The Last of the Sea Women (2024)

Sue Kim’s documentary “The Last of the Sea Women” has a single voice at the very beginning. A woman narrates her experience just before she goes into the ocean to look for fish or any other forms of life, The camera relocates focus, and it turns out that there in fact are plenty of women, this time clad in wet suits, submerged under the waves of the sea. These women are the inhabitants of Jeju Island, South Korea, and practice ‘Haenyo’ which translates into women-free divers, who are claimed to breathe underwater instead of using oxygen tanks.

Another narrator states: “This is a hard-working job which is motivated by love. It is our inheritance from our mothers, our grandmothers. When the conditions are unfavorable, for the problem, when the temperature is low and we do not wish to dive, we do, for there is no choice! It is what we are meant to do, we are women after all.” For ages, the females of this island have harvested sea urchins and collected conch shells and there are records tracing it as far back as then. Last time this number peaked at nearly 30000 women doing the same kind of work.

To date, however, there are only 4000 surviving women who are still engaged in this form of fishing. In the year 2016, however, it was recognized by UNESCO as one of the elements of the intangible cultural heritage. “It’s like making a slow ice cream. Our culture is slowly fading away,” shares one lady.

The most recent members of the haenyo are senior citizens in their 60s to 80s. And yes, these grannies have been doing this for a couple of decades already.

In the first place, we meet a lot of these elderly women who have been haenyeo workers their whole lives. To be a haemo, one has to practice for about a decade, starting as early as 7 years old. In the 1950s it was once considered a shameful activity but even with the respect it is now undergoing, a culture’s surgery still lives a number of brave young women achieving the title is few. Many women explain how they have faced contempt for working jobs like those. While there are only a few who are brave enough to live with such new respect from the culture, most of the women endure working jobs that were once considered shameful.

Looking to be in their thirties, Sohee Jin and Jeongmin Woo are quite popular figures on TikTok and YouTube. In fact, this is the very reason they are willing to risk it all since most of their senior colleagues are of the opinion that this career is quite satisfying and assists in becoming self-sufficient financially. Jin quit a very demanding job and now says that “it is quite liberating and healing when you go out and work”. After her husband’s company collapsed, Jin went to work saying she took up one of the very few jobs that offered some flexibility for working mothers in Korea. 

Speaking of which, I think that Kim’s documentary is, apart from its beautiful subaqueous cinematography, rather simple or straightforward in its concepts as well as how they are executed. While at the residence and on the premises, she uses very few camera tricks to film the everyday activities that preceded their inexpensive head-on content- a series of interviews with them. But this decision allows us to hear the poets speak and see the totality of their commitment to the vocation and the spirit of their cries about the modification of this world which is the message we all should be prepared to hear.

These Women are not on their own. They have only a dwindling number of women to look up to in this line with a combined aching for a women’s revolution. With such differences, the oceans have already witnessed verbal abuse by ‘containers’ of such waste.

To do these, the haenyeo women still have to go scuba diving deeper into the ocean. It will be some time before Oxygen tanks become a standard piece of equipment which many fear will only lead to loss of the resources of the ocean. And neither has social media escaped these transformations, as Jin and Woo also posted their transformations on these platforms. It is only so much thinking about the future of our society and the world around us that we can engage in. On the other hand, all this contemplation comes to great use as women adhere to this holy tradition of wearing communal and supportive strength, starting every act in their stories with laughter. At least until graver news that could potentially endanger the life of the haenyeo women and likely that of the entire island population as well comes in.

Jeju Island is located in Jeju water in Japan and recently Japan has announced it will be releasing nuclear waste into the water due to the Fukushima disaster. They also announced a 30-year marine-resource mission. The Japanese authorities say that this is up to global standards, however, environmental activists consider this a lie.

The story does not end there however, valiant haeynos united and took up arms to assert their voices against the avarice gone rampant within the sea. One of the elder women, Soon Deok Jang goes to Human Rights Council in Switzerland and puts forth their cause. It appears that she is quite resolved, and I can tell that she intends to deliver her statement with all the force she has. However, the past year has shown that those august international courts, which claim to be the last bastion of hope for the people in the world, are not the last hope for the common man. 

“Shaman do is the spirit of Morgan, where there is sea there will always be haenyeo ” Jin pronounces. Then the sprite of the sea is. They have this confidence. It looks like Kim also has this trust and finishes her documentary with an episode of her foreign colleagues, together with her met during joint celebrations of haenyeo. As for me, I have different thoughts.

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