10 great films set in fishing towns

Since his breakthrough feature Bait (2019), Mark Jenkin has been the torchbearer for all the cinematic pleasures of the fishing village. His mesmeric new film, Rose of Nevada (2025), wrests fresh drama from those same waters.

Jenkin’s filmography joins a rich history of movies set within fishing villages and towns. On the most basic level, between the wide open sea, the colourful boats and the historical architecture, these locations make a fetching background to any story, no matter the tone or the genre.

They also come loaded with atmosphere. Even the early classic Hollywood movies set in a studio rather than on location could create arresting images from a water tank, a fog machine, and smart lighting. Then there were those at the other end of the realism spectrum, which found a starker beauty in the documentary-style footage of (often real) fishermen undertaking their arduous vocation.

That arduousness is another feature of these films. Fishing is a tough business, taxing on both the body and the spirit. Whole livelihoods depend on the whims of the weather. People die on the job.  Even when the actual profession isn’t foregrounded, the hardening effect of living with such relentless precarity is often visible in the characters who populate these productions; a tough, dauntless bunch, used to facing the worst uncomplaining. Sometimes all they’ve had to endure binds these communities together against the vicissitudes of fate. Sometimes it sets them at loggerheads. Either way, it makes for excellent drama.

Director: Anatole Litvak

Jonah (Thomas Mitchell) and Olaf (John Qualen) are two humble friends whose greatest pleasure in life is spending evenings after work fishing together in their little boat. One day, racketeer Goff (John Garfield) ambles into town and starts burning the boats of the men who won’t pay him protection money. Jonah and Olaf pay at first, but soon hit their breaking point. Matters are further complicated when Goff starts dating Jonah’s daughter, Stella (Ida Lupino).

Out of the Fog was based on Irwin Shaw’s 1930 play The Gentle People. While it’s clearly shot in a studio, renowned cinematographer James Wong Howe packs the movie with atmosphere, creating an dreamlike, evocative netherworld that helps the story escape its stage origins. Engagingly acted, the film is particularly notable for affording stalwart character actor Mitchell – who made memorable appearances in such classics as Stagecoach, Gone with the Wind (both 1939) and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) – a rare leading role.

Director: Luchino Visconti

From the artificial to the all too real. La terra trema focuses on one Sicilian fishing family who decide to stop being exploited by the wholesalers at the market, and go into business for themselves. After a brief flush of success, a storm at sea and an unwise loan leave the family in a spiral of ruin.

The precarity of the fishing life has rarely been depicted as evocatively as in Luchino Visconti’s neorealist classic. As was standard in Italian neorealism, Visconti shot La terra trema with non-professional actors, who lived and worked in the Sicilian town of Aci Trezza (one of the main locations there is now a museum dedicated to the film). Though it’s ultimately a bleak, despairing tale, which sees no escape for the poverty spiral of the town’s put-upon workers, Visconti’s deep feeling for them is vividly clear. They may have been non-professional actors, but their faces are haunting.

Director: Agnès Varda

Considered by many to be the instigating work of the French New Wave, La Pointe-Courte was also Agnès Varda’s first feature. Shot in the Mediterranean port town of Sète, where Varda spent much of her adolescence, the film intersperses the dialogue of a couple on the verge of divorce (Sylvia Monfort and Philippe Noiret) with the struggles of the local fishermen against the coastal authority who’s trying to stop them fishing in the local bay.

While Varda’s debut has a similar grounding in documentary reality to La terra trema (‘les inhabitants de La Pointe-Courte’ share her credit for writing and directing on the opening titles) La Pointe-Courte has a sunnier outlook, her film above all being a celebration of the community. Varda’s love of the place where she grew up radiates in every scene, culminating with a memorable water jousting festival that the whole town gathers together to cheer on.

Director: Yasujiro Ozu

A colour and sound remake of his own black-and-white silent movie, A Story of Floating Weeds (1934), Yasujiro Ozu’s Floating Weeds tells the story of an itinerant theatre group who arrive in a fishing village to perform. There, the group’s leader Komajuro (Nakamura Ganjiro II) reunites with an old flame, Oyoshi (Haruko Sugimura), and their son Kiyoshi (Hiroshi Kawaguchi), who thinks Komajuro is just his uncle. This reunion sparks a dangerous flame of jealousy in Komajuro’s current parter, Sumiko (Machiko Kyo).

As with the majority of Ozu’s work, Floating Weeds is mostly shot in interiors, but the idyllic coastal setting and Kojun Saito’s whimsical score makes an intriguing counterbalance to the emotional turmoil at the movie’s centre. The handful of exterior seaside scenes are captured beautifully by cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa, who often worked with fellow Japanese directing luminaries Kenji Mizoguchi and Akira Kurosawa.

Director: John Carpenter

It’s the night before the centennial celebrations in the fishing town of Antonio Bay, California, but there’s something strange in the air – or rather, the sea. A bank of fog is rolling in, yet it’s blowing against the wind. On land, alarms are set off with no apparent cause, dogs are barking at nothing, odd figures prowl. Soon, people start to die. What’s going on?

In this thickly atmospheric classic, horror maestro John Carpenter conjures up a haunting story of long repressed evil, based on the true tale of an 18th-century ship that was deliberately sunk and plundered using a fake landing light off the coast of California (he also found some inspiration from a particularly foggy visit to Stonehenge). In Carpenter’s The Fog, the sea is a vast, unknowable force that hems in the citizens of Antonio Bay, narrowing their options for escape when the vengeful ghosts come hunting.

Director: Bill Forsyth

When American oil man Macintyre (Peter Riegart) arrives in a beautiful Scottish coastal village, intending to buy the whole thing to turn it into a refinery, it would be reasonable to assume the inhabitants of said village would not be too pleased about the prospect. Not in Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero – in fact, they collectively struggle to tamp down their enthusiasm so that Macintyre will ramp up the price. Only a stubborn, solitary old beachcomber, Ben (Fulton Mackay), stands in the way of their windfall.

Majestically shot by cinematographer Chris Menges, Local Hero ducks the tonal traps of its premise at every turn, leavening the sentimentality with a dry, oddball wit, and the potential preachiness with a soul-lifting touch of magical realism. The film also boasts one of Burt Lancaster’s final great performances (his two-million-dollar salary constituted a major part of the movie’s budget), and Peter Capaldi’s breakout role.

Director: John Sayles

Director/cinematographer team John Sayles and Haskell Wexler made a trio of films together rooted in the natural world: Matewan (1987) in the vivid green hills of West Virginia; Limbo (1999) in a coastal Alaskan town, then a deserted island; and The Secret of Roan Inish (1994) in a picturesque Irish fishing village and a tiny island off its coast.

All three are wonderful, but the Irish-set production was perhaps the most visually resplendent, with Wexler’s lushly lensed vistas a suitably ethereal setting for Sayles’ folkloric tale about a girl (Jeni Courtney) desperate to find her little brother (Cillian Byrne) who washed out to sea years earlier. Word is, he may have become a selkie. Despite the mystical nature of the story, the naturalistic cinematography and Sayles’ attention to the family’s financial and emotional struggles keeps The Secret of Roan Inish grounded in a recognisable reality.  

Director: Kenneth Lonergan

Lee (Casey Affleck) has been living in a city basement room, doing janitorial work for four different apartment buildings, ever since a horrifying accident for which he was responsible drove him from his coastal home. But after his brother (Kyle Chandler) dies, he’s called back to Manchester by the Sea, to look after his 16-year-old nephew (Lucas Hedges), and to face his demons.

While bookended by joyful scenes on boats, fishing is peripheral to the plot in Kenneth Lonergan’s Oscar-winning 2016 film. Lonergan’s focus is squarely on how Lee contends with his unfathomable trauma, and on how the tight-knit but stoic community reacts to his return and the immense emotional baggage he brings with him. This was far from the first movie shot in the scenic Massachusetts town, with Mermaids (1990), The Good Son (1993) and State and Main (2000) all having paid visits.

Director: Mark Jenkin

Mark Jenkin had been making features for two decades previously, but Bait was his first film to get significant distribution – as well as directing, he also wrote, cut, shot, and composed the music. It follows native Cornish fisherman Martin (Edward Rowe), his struggles to buy his own boat, and his increasing antipathy with the out-of-towners who bought his home and rent part of it out to tourists. Eventually, this mutual disdain bubbles over into deadly violence.

Though the setting could hardly be more different, the mounting tension in the relationship between the tourists and the locals means that Bait plays out something like a classical western. Jenkin fills his film with both visual and aural texture, the crackly grain on the Kodak 16mm black-and-white photography and the post-synched dialogue giving it a striking atmosphere that makes it feel both out of space and time, and tangibly rooted in its specific community.  

Directors: Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy

Blow the Man Down leans fast and hard into the tropes of the fishing movie, opening with a group of fishermen standing on a dock singing a variation on the titular sea shanty (“If you ain’t into fishing, hell you’re in the wrong place!”), intercut with images of fish being sliced. Then they cede the stage to a pair of sisters (Morgan Saylor and Sophie Lowe) who move swiftly from the funeral of their mother to covering up the killing of a nefarious man (Ebon Moss-Bachrach).

Danielle Krudy and Bridget Savage Cole’s debut isn’t shy about its embrace of the maritime, yet Blow the Man Down moves beyond the clichés to deliver a tight, engaging thriller which revolves around a fractured matriarchy that has been secretly running the town for decades. The film brilliantly pits celebrated characters actresses June Squibb and Margo Martindale against each other, giving the latter a particularly meaty role.

Rose of Nevada is in cinemas from 24 April 2026 and on BFI Player and Blu-ray in August.

Mark Jenkin’s Cornish trilogy is screening at BFI Southbank.