Want to fish at the end of the world? Ready to get tossed around like an old pair of undies in a dryer before you reach atoll paradise, where you’ll catch fish you’ll remember forever, and I mean every single one? Then head to Mauritius, then hop on a boat to St. Brandon. By then you’ve already done the hardest part, but you don’t care, because you know happiness has a price. Besides the three months’ salary you just blew, the joy of fishing in the middle of the Indian Ocean is a memory that will stay with you for a long, long time!
Alright, enough BS. Go full screen, and get ready to cry.
The Shoals is a film from Ben Annibali and Ross Purnell that focuses on finding wild places in a rapidly shrinking world. Set on St. Brandon Atoll–a remote coral archipelago nearly 270 nautical miles northeast of Mauritius–the film opens with a simple question: What hope do we leave behind when we’re gone?
Difficult seas and long crossings have kept St. Brandon largely unknown, protecting it by isolation as much as by intention. St. Brandon’s shoals once wrecked wooden ships just as surely as they do steel hulls today, and the story of the dodo–flightless, tame, and gone within a century–serves as both history lesson and warning. Shipwrecked sailors were the last people to see dodos alive, harvesting them on these same reefs and lagoons. Today, rusting vessels and fuel leaks pose a new kind of threat, lingering in a marine ecosystem that remains one of the last truly intact on the planet. The parallel is impossible to ignore: Untouched places are not immune.
Against that backdrop, bonefish slide through surf, permit materialize from the waves, and giant trevallies shadow nurse sharks across the flats in bursts of chaos.