The Sea is an Edge and an Ending

The poet Lavinia Greenlaw has written and directed The Sea is an Edge and an Ending, a short film investigating what it means to lose your memory and disappear into the present tense. Its framework is a sequence she wrote about her father’s death from Alzheimer’s. The film focuses on what it means for your sense of self to come loose and for the past to float free. It carries echoes of Shakespeare’s Tempest in its study of a man under a kind of spell, whose child must observe his strange and terrifying liberation. The film moves from the shifting coastal landscape of the east of England, a geography central to Greenlaw’s life and work, to eroded interiors containing only the bare structures and reduced emblems of this man’s life. The Sea is an Edge and an Ending is Greenlaw’s first film and extends the practice she developed in her award-winning sound work, Audio Obscura.