TIM WONG reports from the Wellington International Film Festival programme launch.

Sturdy without scaling new heights, this year’s programme unveil nevertheless managed to invoke surprise: the lack of controversial content, for one; the news that Telecom will not be renewing their naming-rights sponsorship (which means what for attracting international guests?); the long-overdue introduction of a festival concession ticket. Such points of discussion, though, were superseded by the event’s feature presentation. Sensing another middling, all-purpose documentary on the launch invite (Dave Chappelle’s Block Party aside, recent years have seen attendees humoured by the likes of Double Dare and Touching the Void), the night’s real bombshell was, against all expectations, the film itself: not another tall tale of survival, but a quiet revelation of human fallibility, fraudulence, and compelling oceanic adventure.

Drawing from a well of sixties archival footage, Deep Water is not without its 21st century mod-cons (spiffy marintime graphics keep us sufficiently up to speed), but benefits greatly from establishing protagonist Donald Crowhurst in vintage living colour – foibles, shortcomings, and all – as he embarks on an unprecedented solo round the world yacht race with little hands-on experience or rational thought. Lacking a similar reference point, Touching the Void’s problem was to rely on slick re-enactments as a substitute for actuality, and there’s always been lingering doubt over how embellished events were given its thrilling cinematic license. Deep Water negates this quandary by acknowledging just how fishy a person’s recollection of the ‘one that got away’ can be: in Crowhurst’s case, the stubborn sailor has grown a nose long enough for a spare mast by the voyage’s end. To reveal the extent of his skulduggery would be to spoil the film’s many unexpected shifts; needless to say, several unforeseen plot twists make this the stuff of movies. And for a time, the documentary becomes a fraud in itself, conceding to the allure of storytelling. None of which matters, of course, because its very conceit is the exaggeration of truth.

Back in England, Crowhurst’s Fleet Street crony never let the facts get in the way of a good story, and the logbooks discovered aboard the battered vessel mimic such journalistic creativity. But they also reveal a psychological disintegration at the hands of Mother Nature, and the old adage that lying comes back to haunt you. A nautical train wreck, Crowhurst achieved a prolonged stay at sea against most predictions, yet also dug himself a rather large hole during the 200+ day circumnavigation; the film’s title essentially a euphemism for ‘Deep Shit’. Approaching the end, his writings turn increasingly disturbed, and there’s a level of discomfort in being privy to all the despairing details. Fellow Lumière critic Brannavan Gnanalingam pondered after the film’s conclusion what Werner Herzog would’ve made of all of this, and one can instantly envisage the German’s treatment: the mirrors of obsession, the burden of dreams, the thickly accented monologue on the supremacy of the ocean and the existential solitude of man. Like the audio recording in Grizzly Man, and the waterfall footage in The White Diamond, one can also assume that Herzog would have never opened Crowhurst’s final pages, letting the fantasy rest with its maker rather than compromise the portal between fiction and reality.