WRITTEN BY STEPHANIE BOUCHARD
Karen Cooper’s family roots go deep in Maine’s fishing and boating industry. Brought up in lobster fishing and a lobster fisher herself, when she decided she wanted to start a kelp farm, she turned to her father Foy Brown — an institution in their hometown of North Haven — to help her get started. But not because he had any knowledge of kelp farming. In fact, he was downright skeptical about it.
Despite his doubt, Brown wanted to support his daughter and helped her set the lines of “slime” when she got her first kelp seeds.
“Pretty soon, we go over there one day, and I’ll be goddamned there was kelp three or four inches long. You could have knocked me over with a feather,” Brown says in a short film featuring Cooper’s kelp farm business, Tidal 9 Fisheries.
The Tidal 9 Fisheries film is one of five in the Maine Coast Harvest documentary film series, which spotlights a variety of the state’s sea farmers in the aquaculture industry. Funded by Bill and Patty Zimmerman’s ZFund, the films were produced by GoodFight Media, which has studios in Portland and in Washington, DC, in cooperation with the Maine Aquaculture Association.
In an effort to address “misconceptions and knowledge gaps” about aquaculture, MAA wanted to put a focus on the farmers themselves, said Trixie Betz, MAA’s outreach and development specialist, and to use film in particular to do that.
“We’re seeing increasingly that film as a medium is really powerful for bridging those gaps of knowledge,” she said. “We see that visual mediums can go a long way — not to discount other types of mediums — but the accessibility is there, the showing versus telling, the relatability of showing here’s what someone does for work, but here’s also what they do with their personal life. Here’s what their family life is like; here is what has brought them there.”
“I don’t think there’s any better source to understand how this all works (aquaculture) than the people who were doing it,” said Nathan Golon, cinematographer and co-founder of GoodFight Media. “There’s something about hearing it from them that I think helps you understand a little bit deeper than you would by just reviewing information, watching a PowerPoint, et cetera. It really brings out the nuance of this industry and making the choice to be a part of it.”
For Golon, who grew up in Maine, making these films personal meant talking with people from throughout the industry, and spending time with the sea farmers being featured in the films.
“What we really wanted to do is focus on the people and what their motivations were, what their backstories were, what some of the challenges of starting their businesses were, and how they’re doing, and how it fits into their lifestyle in Maine generally,” he said.
The films tell the stories of sea farmers working in niches of the aquaculture industry, including seaweed and oyster farming, from various parts of the state. These “real people” films not only reveal personal stories, but illustrate how traditional fishermen are diversifying their businesses with aquaculture; how women are building their own businesses; how the industry can be an option for retaining the state’s young people; environmental stewardship; and how running their own sea farm businesses supports living the lives they want to live in Maine.
The films, which were produced and released over the last five years, were screened at specific locations when they were released and shared with policymakers and others. They can be viewed online at mainecoastharvest.com.
