Cargo 2001

Directed by Laura Waddington

CARGO is the story of a journey, I made on a container ship with a group of Rumanian and Filipino sailors, who were delivering cargo to the Middle East. I stayed on the ship six weeks. Most of the sailors weren’t allowed to leave the boat and they spent their days waiting, singing karaoke and telling me stories in a small TV room. In Syria, the ports were military zones. I hid at a porthole and secretly filmed the life below: a man stealing wood, a soldier fishing off the edge of an abandoned submarine. Later, I made a narrative, that falls between reality and fiction. It was a way of showing the limbo these men were living in.