CARGO

A Trip Through Europe - Landscape as a Political Space: Netherlands

Awards

• ARTE Prize for Best European Short Film 48th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Germany (2002)
• First Prize (ex aequo) Videoex – International Experimental Film and Video Festival, Switzerland (2002)


Cargo is the story of a journey that the filmmaker made on a container ship with a group of Romanian, Polish, and Filipino sailors, who were delivering cargo to the Middle East. Most of the sailors weren’t allowed to leave the boat, and they spent their days waiting, singing karaoke, and telling stories. In Syria, the ports were military zones, so she hid at a porthole and secretly filmed the life below: a man stealing wood, a soldier fishing off the edge of an abandoned submarine. Later, Waddington made a narrative that falls between reality and fiction as a way of showing the limbo that these men were living in.

This film was commissioned by the International Film Festival Rotterdam for the project “On the Waterfront”, a series of videos shot in different ports around the world.