April 4, 2018 — “The family fishermen are going the way of family farmers,” says one man interviewed in “Dead in the Water,” the new documentary film by Southern California filmmaker David Wittkower showing at Harbor Theater in Boothbay Harbor on Monday, April 9. Shot in New England coastal towns, the film chronicles the struggles of New England fishermen to remain viable in an age of what some might deem excessive federal regulation of the ground-fishing industry.
“It’s a film from the point of view of the fishermen,” Wittkower said in a recent phone interview from his home in Woodland Hills, Calif. “The government regulations have been so tight on fishermen … that they can’t make a living anymore.
“I wanted to show this industry from the human side.”
Increased regulations have driven up costs for fishermen so much that “a three-man boat went down to a one-man boat,” he said. “The amount of work that one man has to do is amazing.”
Running a one-man boat in the ocean can be dangerous. “In the film, someone says that 87 percent of fishermen in the U.S. are suffering from PTSD,” said Wittkower.
“This film opens the door for the world to see how difficult and dangerous the life of a fisherman is. On top of that, the impact of misguided federal regulations on fishermen has never been presented as powerfully as it is in ‘Dead in the Water,’” said John Bell, the former mayor of Gloucester, Mass., in a recent press release for the movie.
“Dead in the Water” was released last November in Rockport, Mass., Wittkower’s hometown, and has since shown in other Massachusetts coastal towns – Cape Cod, New Bedford, and Gloucester, whose declining fishing industry is chronicled in the film.
Read the full story at the Lincoln County News