Film review: In Ghosts of the Sea, filmmaker takes a riveting look back at family tragedies on the waves

In Virginia Tangvald’s haunting new NFB documentary, she unravels the mysteries of a father and brother who lost their lives to the oceans that called them

By Janet Smith

Ghosts of the Sea.

The VIFF Centre screens the NFB documentary Ghosts of the Sea from July 11 to 17

FILMMAKER VIRGINIA TANGVALD’S haunting new documentary is at once a gripping sea mystery, a deeply personal quest, and a quiet dismantling of the masculine myth of the lone sailor.

It begins with the director’s search for answers about the death of her free-spirited but troubled older brother Thomas, who disappeared while sailing out of French Guiana in 2014. That leads to larger mysteries about her father, Peter Tangvald, who died in a shipwreck with another of the filmmaker’s siblings in 1991. The legendary Norwegian-born sailor not only had a string of children, all born at sea to different, much younger wives, but left a trail of tragedy so remarkable that some interview subjects in the film believe he carried a curse. This is riveting stuff. To give away more would be unfair; suffice it to say that it’s the kind of lore that would be difficult to believe if it was fiction, all rooted in an aching emotional reality.

Both father and son were the kind of seafarers who spurned lifeboats and radios, cruising around the world to escape from society. Tangvald draws on a wealth of archival photos, film, and journals as she retraces their paths, from French Guiana, where her father built his sailboat by hand, to Puerto Rico and beyond. Remarkably, an entire trove of slides washed up on the reef where the patriarch crashed his boat in 1991, saved by a waterproof cannister.

Some of the most telling interviews are with women who knew Peter and Thomas; they reveal a father obsessed with finding “freedom”, even at the cost of neglecting his children. Elsewhere, old seamen help Tangvald get inside the heads of both her father and brother, in an attempt to find out why they would put their wives and small children at risk or leave them behind for the call of the sea.

It’s a testament to Tangvald’s skill that we almost feel like we knew the men she is searching for—the estranged brother in his long dreadlocks, feeling more at home on a rocking deck than on still land; the father with his cold, piercing gaze and reckless, restless drive to stay at sea.

The documentary has an extraordinary visual poetry, with recurring images of seagulls against the sky, the sun glinting off waves, and roiling clouds—all well worth catching on the VIFF big screen. It’s set against resonant bass strings to match the increasingly unsettling subject matter.

Much more than a mystery, Ghosts of the Sea grows into a study of the strange ways we form identity, and of how to break destructive cycles and find hope—at least after escaping the turbulent waters of trauma.  

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