The North Sea, as even its greatest admirers will concede, often glowers an unappetising grey or brown. And we assume that its dull exterior is matched by sediment-filled waters where little life dwells. For years, the friends and family of Peter van Rodijnen wondered why the Dutch cinematographer and diving fanatic spent so much time exploring “this murky bowl of soup”. But, inspired by a childhood of watching Jacques Cousteau’s adventures in rather more enticingly temperate waters, Van Rodijnen’s dedication to North Sea diving gradually revealed its hidden wonders.
Over 20 years, as camera technology improved, Van Rodijnen obtained more and more amazing footage of marine life near his home on the Netherlands coast. Nearly a decade ago, he teamed up with director Mark Verkerk. “We started with the idea,” says Van Rodijnen, “that if somebody can make a movie about the North Sea, it’s got to be us.”
North Sea, Nature Untamed will startle anyone who has ever set eyes on – or dipped a toe in – the shallow sea shared by the coastal nations of north-west Europe. Despite decades of intensive fishing, oil extraction and multiple other exploitations, parts of the North Sea are still alive with luminous pinks, purples and greens; starfish, lobsters, brittle stars, kelp forests, seals and basking sharks. This hidden wilderness may be almost as spectacular as a tropical reef, even if the Great Barrier Reef, where Van Rodijnen began his diving career, is much more accessible.
Part of the reason we rarely comprehend the marine riches of the North Sea is because of epic plankton blooms that, as the film explains, are actually the foundation of this living ecosystem. These annual eruptions feed its whole pyramid of marine life but, combined with the shallow waters and big tides, frequently make underwater visibility too poor to film. “It’s no accident that there are virtually no films about the North Sea,” grimaces Verkerk. “This is really one of the first big attempts. It is incredibly difficult.”
Van Rodijnen, who narrates the film in a charmingly personal way, meticulously assembled his underwater stories from decades of North Sea diving. But during their seven-year shoot, the film-makers faced multiple last-minute cancellations of carefully scheduled trips to join fishers or windfarm construction sites alongside even less predictable attempts to intercept dolphin, bluefin tuna and basking sharks. Four out of every five planned dives in the North Sea were cancelled because of rough seas.
“The visibility can be poor, there can be lots of currents, it is cold,” says Van Rodijnen. “You’ve got depth and the limitations of your scuba devices, so you have 20 or 30 minutes of filming per dive. It’s about patience but it’s more about persistence. You need to just keep pushing to get the shots. I had some sleepless nights, I can tell you.”
Although North Sea, Nature Untamed is awash with charismatic characters – from supersmart orcas to the conscientious shorthorn sculpins that nurse neon-pink eggs until they grow eyes and squiggle out into the dark water – the documentary does not lead with obvious or familiar marine stars. “The big idea is to show the whole system working,” says Verkerk. “It’s fantastic to see the bluefin tuna come back and orcas thriving, but they only do that because of this massive system supporting all of that life.”
Unlike the British natural history film-making tradition, where wild animals are often portrayed in a world without humans, people are shown as key engineers of this living system, for better and for worse. Fishing and overfishing continues to shape the North Sea, and the film reveals the impact of sand eel decline on puffins and follows Van Rodijnen on to a Dutch fishing boat. The boat is a clean, conscientious operation that prides itself on its sustainable methods, eschewing beam or bottom trawling, in which heavy beams and nets plough – and obliterate – the seabed and much of its life. But even this boat’s fishing is a challenging watch as Van Rodijnen witnesses “my subjects, my film stars” – beautiful little sharks and rays – discarded as bycatch.
Later, he joins a mackerel fishing boat off Shetland, a supremely efficient, industrial enterprise. A pod of orcas recognise the sound of the vessel’s winch and pick off any mackerel that evade its vast net. While the orca pod can devour 1,000 mackerel in a day, fishers far outdo that. It is shocking to see the sheer scale of the operation: thousands of fish sucked up giant tubes into a huge steel vat.
Van Rodijnen says he still finds the images upsetting, “but once you get on the boat with those guys and you’re living together for a couple of days, you don’t always agree but you start to understand their situation”. The film is not a polemic. Van Rodijnen believes it is “naive” to hope we can “make one big Marine Protected Area out of the North Sea. That just won’t happen. There’s lots of nuance to understand.”
He opposes bottom trawling and bycatch but the mackerel fishery deploys nets that don’t damage the seabed; nor does it appear to catch large quantities of non-target species. In this case, he says in the film, fishing quotas “seem to work”. However, he would still like to see marine life better protected, particularly by nations such as his own, Denmark and Norway, which he fears could revive destructive deep-sea mining proposals.
For decades, the North Sea has also been challenged by extraction. While the film-makers do not turn their cameras on its oil and gas industries, they do explore the positives and negatives of the offshore windfarm boom. Underwater is “not just a world that you don’t see, but it’s also a world that you don’t hear,” says Verkerk. The film reveals the pounding noise that reverberates through the ocean during construction. “The sound is pretty deafening above the water but underwater it can be 20 times louder,” says Verkerk. “Because visibility is not so good in the North Sea, a lot of marine life is geared for sound. The impact is not just on whales but right down to the actual development of a fish egg.”
As well as providing clean energy, though, there may be an unforeseen upside to the North Sea windfarms. Van Rodijnen’s most surprising dive is to some rocks that accidentally fell from a ship 30 years ago. Similar to those used at the base of windfarms, the rocks have over three decades had their grey surface transformed by multicoloured marine life – a profusion of seaweeds and sea creatures have attached itself to this artificial reef.
With bottom trawling and other commercial fishing prevented within sizeable windfarm areas, de facto marine parks have been established. More mini artificial reefs could flourish over the coming decades. “Give nature a chance and it responds,” says Van Rodijnen. “It’s good to keep a constant eye on how the system reacts to these many windfarms being built. But in the end, they can absolutely have a positive effect on marine life.”
Verkerk and Van Rodijnen sound surprised and delighted by the success of their film, which they have been touring for two years across the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and even countries with no North Sea coast such as Austria and Switzerland. There’s now interest in China, Japan, Argentina and Italy, perhaps because it is ultimately a universal film about the life-giving miracle that is the sea.
“It’s very much out of sight out of mind, isn’t it?” says Verkerk. “Even for those of us who live around the North Sea, it’s a little underwhelming. But it is actually an incredibly interesting sea. A lot of the problems facing seas and oceans all around the world are at their most acute here – the North Sea is leading the way in exploitation but also in solutions.”
“There’s a lot of parties wanting to get something out of the oceans,” adds Van Rodijnen, “and there are a lot of discussions about the North Sea. What we’re trying to do with the film is spark wonder by showing what’s down there. Then you bring about a bit of love and understanding.”
