All Rivers Spill Their Stories to the Sea: Jeanie Finlay’s documentary is a display of community solidarity in the face of ecological disaster

Welcome to north-east England: “land of opportunity”, in the words of boosters old and new; “the back hole of the country, just forgotten about”, per one of many fishermen who face destitution after a series of crab and lobster mass mortality events since 2021 that have decimated their catches, littering beaches 60 miles down the coast to Scarborough with crustacean corpses. “Anywhere else, the government would be throwing every resource” at the problem, says the same man, before he turns away, too upset by a question about how he is managing to feed his family to face the camera.

Others may beg to differ – the passing figure of a regional reporter, working independently after refusing to pull his punches for the local paper, stands for another blighted profession struggling through rising murk. More germanely, coastal and fishing communities from Cornwall to Yarmouth feel the same neglect, underscored by the fleeting lip-service won when they protest at the ballot box. All that said, the north-east has statistics and a story of struggle spanning 1970s and 80s deindustrialisation and now the contradictions of Brexit to affirm its sense of abandonment, as Jeanie Finlay explores in this investigation of downstream toxicity, in which the environmental echoes the political and historical.

“The rest of the country might view this region as a dump but we love it,” says Stan Rennie. For her protagonist, the Stockton-born Finlay, who hasn’t filmed locally since Sound It Out (2011), a portrait of Teesside’s last record shop, has found a fisherman of pluck and pride. Faced with community wipe-out from what they suspect is ecocide, Rennie has formed the North East Fishing Collective to push for answers and action. Finlay joins him at sea, but also in the pub and the community hall, rallying 60 or so fellow fishers, hosting the shadow environment minister and venturing to Westminster to testify to a parliamentary committee. She also speaks to a beach walker who has witnessed and reported many of the crab deaths; Dr Sue Wilson, a researcher studying rising sickness and deaths in the Tees’s seal population; and local scientists pursuing inquiries into possibly marine contamination by chemicals from former Tees industrial sites.

Finlay has her antagonists too, heard in media clips but not met by the filmmakers or, apparently, the fishers. Chief among them is Ben Houchen, the Tees Valley mayor whose man-of-the-people stylings are belied by his raw belligerence when challenged about marine disturbance from dredging the harbour during hastened works for his giant Teesworks free port development. Collectors of political wonderment will also prize the world-weary condescension of then environment secretary Thérèse Coffey at the House of Commons dispatch box, scolding an MP pressing questions on behalf of the fishers and coastal communities for daring to challenge her department’s scientists. (So much for that Brexit government’s anti-expertise populism.)

The film’s investigation is frustrated by the same lack of answers that its subjects suffer from: we hear from the BBC that a DoE report “vindicates” Houchen’s denials that unsettled pollutants could have caused the die-offs, but local scientists deride this. (The debate continues, seemingly both stymied and driven by the authorities’ reluctance to gather more data.) The fishers and co at least have a coherent and credible story – one Finlay tells well, if you allow its turbid waters as expressive in themselves, and one that demands answers, for the sake of all manner of life and organic wealth. Houchen is not the only recent British politician to try bulldozing nature and settled communities to show he is ‘delivering’ on promises of economic development, but the brittleness of his storytelling says something about the continued capture of our political imaginary by big money and patronage projects. Coinciding with yet another change of central guard, to a government preaching local empowerment, Finlay’s film couldn’t be more timely. It may not assuage, but its solidarity with people who persist with their vocation and lives’ passions, fighting against the current – a group that includes Rennie, Wilson the seal researcher and (as Wilson points out) Finlay herself – is salutary.

► All Rivers Spill Their Stories to the Sea is in UK cinemas 23 October.