Since 1990, Ke Chin-yuan, a director of documentaries, has spent much of his time under water.

His work has long had a focus on ecological issues, but as soon as mention is made of the ocean, Ke admits that the topic exerts a special pull on him. In particular, when looking at the unique character of Taiwan’s marine life and the irreversible changes that have occurred to these ecologies over the last 20 years, he has deep concerns that he finds hard to put into words.

“Fire fishing,” which uses an acetylene flame to attract fish, is a dying practice. Ke documented how fishing boats based in Jinshan’s Huanggang fishing harbor employed the method.

Returning his focus to the sea

Born and raised in a fishing village in Changhua, Ke has never been a stranger to the natural environment of the ocean. Using a linear timeline for Ocean, so that the film doubles as a field survey, Ke provides a means for the ocean to speak for itself.

Ke had for many years taken precious images of the underwater world and filmed a series of works on various topics for Taiwan’s Public Television Service (PTS). But he felt that he had one duty yet to fulfill: He wanted to make a documentary that would completely reassess Taiwan’s ocean environment and the changes to it. Such were the origins of his plans to make this film.

He began planning in 2009 and then started to move on the plan in 2010. With a new high-definition video camera, he embarked on more than five years of shooting. Finally, by the start of 2016, he had assembled 35 segments—each a short video documentary telling a simple story—into the film Ocean, which was subsequently screened on PTS.

The first scene of the documentary shows a hot spring gushing from seabed fissures. Countless bubbles gurgle forth, providing the opening scene’s only sound. Taiwan is an island where earthquakes are common, and Ke hopes that the opening will allow viewers to understand that the island’s geologic dynamism is rooted in the world beneath the ocean surface.

The work’s 35 segments in sequence show geologic history, biological evolution, the impact of human activity, and finally ecological devastation and renewal. Each segment highlights footage of well-known species to tell different tales. “Ocean sprang from observations accumulated for over 20 years,” Ke explains. “Rather than calling it a documentary, it might be better to describe it as a narrative introduction.”

Manmade garbage hangs starkly on an oyster frame. Ke Chin-yuan uses his lens to document the degradation of the marine ecology. (photo by Chuang Kung-ju)

Gazing into our ocean

This time Ke chose an unflashy method of showing the story of the ocean: no narration, no musical soundtrack, only the sound of the bottom of the sea.
“My hope is that everyone will quietly gaze at the images,” Ke says. “Music and narration would have influenced the viewers’ emotions and might have limited the meaning that I hope people will take from the film.” Ke explains that many people never get an opportunity to go to the ocean. They’ve never heard a crab crawl. They may not know that fish make sounds. They may be unaware of the baby-babble calls of whales. He hopes to provide another means of listening to the ocean.

Speaking about the production process, Yu Li-ping, the producer of the PTS program Our Island, explains that originally the plan was for Ocean to be structured around looks at different families of biological species, as well as conservation efforts. It was supposed to highlight the lovable but also feature educational content. But as director, Ke didn’t think it was innovative enough. For a Taiwanese work to create a splash internationally, it has to break new ground.

Yu says that this is the first time Ke had ever eschewed the use of music. After skillfully cutting raw footage, Ke took all of the video segments and pieced them together to create the narrative arc of the documentary as a whole. During this period, he quite frequently reedited the video, changing the sequence of clips. He was continually looking for appropriate music, but he always found himself criticizing what he heard as unimaginative and clichéd—until finally he ended up doing without the music altogether.

The schools of mackerel in the waters around the Malaysian island of Sipadan are the fruits of marine conservation efforts. At one time Taiwan had similarly rich fisheries.

Searching in three oceans

Thanks to shooting Ocean, Ke found a new way of being moved and a new passion: filming humpback whales. He’s been chasing after them for 20 years. “I waited from 1990 until 2001 before at last in an Orchid Island bay I saw a humpback during its migration through Taiwan’s waters. It probably stayed there for about a month. We rented boats to go out to it but we couldn’t dive and video it underwater, because as soon as the boat got close it would take off.

In fact, during the Japanese era, southern Taiwan was a hotspot for whale hunting. Although whaling is banned there now, many whales were caught in the waters offshore during the 1930s. To revisit what Taiwan would have been like back when it was major spot on whale migration routes, Ke and his team specially visited the Kingdom of Tonga in the South Pacific to look for humpback whales. “On the first day, I shot the very kind of footage of a humpback I had been seeking for over 20 years. It was quite moving. I remember asking myself: Is this real? My dream is coming true…. I wanted just to stare at him, but I had to remind myself that I had work to do. Immediately I used my camera to make a detailed record, afraid that he would quickly swim away.” 

Documentary filmmakers must set aside their emotions when they are behind the camera. But in this case Ke’s emotions are palpable in the shots he captured. Yu remembers how Ke was tightly clutching the camera after he got back on the boat, his entire body shaking. She wasn’t sure if it was because Ke was physically drained or psychologically moved. Yu ended up catching Ke’s infectious enthusiasm: “Every day we’d be out on the sea for more than 12 hours, waiting,” she recalls. “Then we’d spend several hours gaining the whales’ acceptance, until we were sure that they wouldn’t swim away. Only then would we slowly drop into the water. Watching them breach and hearing their calls was truly a moving experience.”

Due to human impacts of various kinds, many marine animal species are no longer commonly seen in Taiwan’s waters. Ke chose to go abroad to shoot so as to remind us all to find a proper way of coexisting with these animals, so that we will be able to enjoy these ocean resources forever.

Coral reefs spawning in the sea; huge schools of migrating barracuda; cardinalfish swimming in “forests” of Sargassum seaweed; crabs scurrying across the land toward the sea, shaking eggs off from under their bellies; horseshoe crabs—veritable living fossils—being pushed by the tide to lay their eggs on shore; a ceremony in Orchid Island in which the Tao people catch flying fish using the methods of their ancestors; women gathering seaweed with their bare hands off the northeast coast of Taiwan…. To capture these scenes, Ke used up an average of 200 canisters of oxygen per year. He kept in constant contact with fishermen, not willing to pass up any opportunity to document migrations of fish of any kind whether in the Pacific, Indian or Atlantic oceans.

The red crabs of Australia’s Christmas Island need to cross the land to lay their eggs in the sea. Meanwhile, efforts to conserve Taiwan’s terrestrial crabs have been hindered by hotel development along its coasts.

A call for people power

Ke also made a long-term documentary record about the situation in the waters surrounding Taiwan’s offshore islands. For more than a decade he applied every year for permission to go to film in the waters around Taiping Island in the South China Sea.

Apart from the challenges he faced to get approval, there was the issue of only being able to get there by taking a freighter that visits once a month on a seven-day round trip. Ke is prone to seasickness, and he muddled through with seasickness pills for those three days of bobbing at sea on the way there and again on the way back. Altogether he had to go there three times before he got shots of green turtles going ashore to lay their eggs.

He has shot documentaries in Taiwan for nearly 30 years, starting with the exposés and social and political critiques of his early career, to works aimed at bringing greater cohesion to the diverse society of Taiwan in his middle period, to more recent calls for citizen empowerment and environmental conservation. As time has passed, Ke has witnessed much positive change: “After 20 years of education and consciousness-raising, the public’s understanding of their own power and potential for activism has matured. They know they can have a real impact on environmental policy. The media here is very democratic. You can film, say and criticize what you want. This gives a lot of freedom to us documentary filmmakers.”

One experiences the hardships of documentary filmmaking in the ocean the moment one jumps into the water: Several times Ke has been carried far from the shooting area by strong currents. Once he was almost swept into Japanese territorial waters. He loves the sea, but there’s no way to change the sea’s fickle nature when you’re filming it. When you’re climbing a mountain you can rest, but under water there’s no place to fall back to. Often you’ll be in the water for days and not get any shots of what you were after. Ke feels that there is never enough footage when you’re shooting in the ocean. He plans to make Ocean available to the public without charge and has edited 46 clips of it accompanied by music and put them on the Internet. He hopes that more people will see them.

As the documentary ends, it holds on a shot of oval squids artificially cultured by conservation workers, and a shot of Ke himself swimming by a pile of breakwater blocks. The images seem to remind us that the story of the ocean’s future—the one describing whether the ocean is heading toward destruction or toward a better outcome—is still being written.     

The red crabs of Australia’s Christmas Island need to cross the land to lay their eggs in the sea. Meanwhile, efforts to conserve Taiwan’s terrestrial crabs have been hindered by hotel development along its coasts.

Late spring to early summer is the coral spawning season in Hengchun’s tropical reefs. Ocean captures precious images of the spawning process.

Humpback whales used to breed and feed in Taiwan’s waters. The last time Ke Chin-yuan saw a humpback around Taiwan was off Orchid Island in 2001. In 2015 he traveled to Vava’u, Tonga to realize a long-held dream of swimming with these magnificent creatures.