Environmental Politics, Deluge And The Dimensions Of Resistance In Elisa Sepulveda Ruddoff’s “Above The Waterline” (Obras Muertas)

 There is a particular kind of documentary that refuses to make its case too loudly, and trusts the slow accumulation of observed detail to do the heavy lifting. Above the Waterline (Obras Muertas) (2026), the feature debut of Franco-Chilean filmmaker Elisa Sepulveda Ruddoff, leans towards that tradition. It is a film that earns its silences, and occasionally strains under the weight of the moral questions it poses without quite answering.

Ruddoff arrives at the director’s chair with considerable behind-the-scenes pedigree. Having produced Olivier Ducastel’s Don’t Look Down (Haute Perches, 2019) and Alireza Khatami’s Oblivion Verses (Los Versos del Olvido, 2017), she brings an evident fluency with the grammar of observational cinema. Above the Waterline confirms that her instincts translate from production to direction, though with the occasional unevenness one might reasonably expect from a first feature.

The opening montage presents a road seen upside down, the horizon dissolving into a heat mirage, the identity of the surrounding landscape withheld. Whether it constitutes a pretty sight is anyone’s guess. When the image finally corrects itself, what we find are the tell-tale signatures of an encroaching deluge, with hares foraging on environmental waste and rocks fissured to their core.

The film dispenses almost entirely with voiceover narration, letting action shots and vivant footage carry the weight of exposition. Edited by Juan Eduardo Murillo with an instinct for meaningful juxtaposition, the film makes its case via images, routines and gestures rather than thesis statements.

The world depicted here is one of competing survivals. The indigenous residents of this coastal area attempt to sustain a way of life that the environment itself struggles to support. The degradation around them is immediate, visible in the cracks of ancient rock and the eroding shoreline. Yet these people persist, bending what rules they can, navigating the waterways as their ancestors did, because what else is there to do when livelihood and identity are inseparable from the very place that is being devoured?

The Chilean military begins to intrude into this already precarious existence. A naval base operates in the area, and the routines of state power intersect, sometimes violently, with those of the local population. The navy exploits the same waters with a predatory efficiency that dwarfs anything the fishermen are capable of, their sailboats circling with the impunity that institutional authority confers. The locals live in a state of low-grade paranoia, regarding anyone who fraternises with naval personnel with the suspicion reserved for collaborators. Anyone who has read the history of maritime territories and military encroachment will recognise the dynamic. These are people staring down the possibility that they will simply be removed from the story of a land that made them who they are.

This is where Above the Waterline begins to reveal its genuine ambition. The film allows its subjects to occupy the position of protagonists — people fighting to protect their patrimony, their fishing rights, their very presence on land now threatened by forced eviction in the name of “development” — and then, without abandoning them, begins to complicate that positioning. The landscape becomes an active presence, the seasons and light sculpting the film’s rhythm in ways that set the stage for ideological debates. It gradually acquires the density of a character, one in whose interiority the film is as invested as that of any of its human subjects. We are watching a food chain, and the environment sits at the bottom of it, voiceless and rapidly consumed.

The most arresting sequence arrives when a seal is found dead on the shoreline, and vultures descend on the carcass. The image functions as a metaphor: in an ecosystem where every constituent, from the navy to the fishermen to the development authorities, engages in some form of extraction, who bears responsibility? Are the locals innocent simply because they are the least powerful? Can a victim of dispossession simultaneously be a contributor to environmental carnage, and if so, does that diminish the validity of their claims to ownership?

Where the film is perhaps most interesting is in its willingness to interrogate the reliability of its own subjects’ narration. These people are not simply heroes standing firm against the machinery of state and capital; they are participants in the ecological order they are, rightfully, also mourning. The ethics of their situation are interrogated, and Ruddoff has the intellectual honesty to refuse easy absolution for them.

If there is a limitation to Above the Waterline, that would be its (relative) brevity. At 75 minutes, the film occasionally feels as though it has opened a door to a room it does not have quite enough time to fully inhabit. The film’s interpretation of what passes for resistance, particularly in the context of having to grapple with institutional strong-arming and military incursions at the same time, is a motif that could have benefited from a little more exploration. There are also moments when the film’s studied restraint tips into opacity: Ruddoff is clearly averse to the impulse of nonfiction productions to over-explain, but the balance between productive ambiguity and mere inscrutability is not always maintained.

That said, brevity does not translate to shallowness. Ruddoff manages to lay her arguments without sententiousness or didacticism. This documentary does not tell its viewers what to feel; it asks them to look carefully at a situation where nobody has clean hands, and where the environment — unable to vote, unable to litigate — is the only genuinely innocent party. It would have been a simpler body of work had it settled for casting the locals as straightforward victims of state overreach and environmental neglect. Instead, she implicates nearly everyone, asking difficult questions about how easily the victim of a destructive cycle can become the architect.

Above The Waterline screened in the Burning Lights competition at the 57th Visions Du Reel.

By Jerry Chiemeke
Copyright FIPRESCI 2026