Leviathan Cycle, Episode 6: Ding Ling & Senait, 2020

Commissioned by CCA Tel Aviv, Outset Foundation for Contemporary Art, The (He)art for He(art) Program (Francisca Viudes) and Arts Council England. Courtesy of the artist and UBIK Productions.

Click here to view a trailer.

Click here for more information about the Leviathan Cycle.

Leviathan Cycle is a multi-episode film series. and part of Shezad Dawood’s groundbreaking multimedia Leviathan project, exploring the intersection of climate change, migration and mental health. Each film has been crafted as a self-contained work blending fictional narrative and documentary footage, with the possibility of being endlessly reconfigured with other episodes to create distinctive storylines extending from the evolving corpus of Leviathan material.

Episode 6 inaugurates the second half of the Leviathan Cycle series. Having taken leave of the ship they were traveling on, Ben and Yasmine head off in one direction, and we now follow their original captors Ding Ling and Nemo, who leave to explore new/old territories. Ding Ling reveals something of her past in China, but also her desire to make an archive of those who remain. She records an interview with Senait, once a refugee from Eritrea, who subsists by evaporating sea water from the Dead Sea to make it potable – a parallel to the oft-unacknowledged violence and survival politics amongst coral.