Andrew S Allen
A great flood has devastated a small town and the survivors are left searching for their loved ones. One survivor washes ashore, and the town skeptics believe him to be the devil. He begins constructing a boat to sail to the underwater afterlife to be reunited with his lost lover. Slowly the various townsfolk come to his side as they yield to hope of bringing back their loved ones. One by one, they begin to bring their most precious items to help construct the boat then all hop aboard for the journey out to sea.
Glory at Sea is a wonderful combo of small human moments and big fantasy ideas. Obvious connections are there to the very real New Orleans disaster, but the story has been refolded into one of hope rather than suffering. If you sense a bit of Ray Tintori’s style, you’re spot onRay had his hands in both the story as well as camera and production design work. It’s a Court 13 production, with many of the same folks behind Ray’s Death to the Tinman and 2008 fave, Jettison Your Loved Ones. But props need to go to director Benh Zeitlin for crafting such a strong story and involving an entire community of real survivors. Though similar in tone, Glory at Sea goes well beyond Tintori’s work in both scale and production value.
Benh explains the original idea came from a script he planned to shoot in Greece about a resurrection from an underwater afterlife. The idea seemed to have a relevancy to post-Katrina New Orleans, so Benh teamed up with Par Parekh and Ray Tintori and rewrote the script to fit the personalities of the local people who lived it. Suddenly, the film went from 7 minutes to 25. The ship, it turns out, was built just as ad hoc as it looks in the film with random pieces found on the side of the road added because of their emotional significance rather than their buoyancy.