The Sea is History, made in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, is a free adaptation of the poem by Derek Walcott. The film is a materialist and animist critique of the monumentalisation of European colonial history, reading the past instead as something intimately entangled within the present - as a living and mutational thing made up of the living and the dead. It is in this sense that the film suggests a way beyond the boundary évent that could be called the Plantationocene (brought on with the onset of modernity and the system of globalised capitalism that started with the colonisation of the Americas in 1492, with Columbus arriving in Ayiti; latter day Dominican Republic) - and towards a possible "Chthulucenic" future of créolised assemblages as a politics of re-narrativising death within life.

Bio
Louis Henderson is a filmmaker who is currently trying to find new ways of working with people to address and question our current global condition defined by racial capitalism and ever-present histories of the European colonial project. The working method is archaeological. Henderson has shown his work at places such as; Rotterdam International Film Festival, Doc Lisboa, CPH:DOX, New York Film Festival, The Contour Biennial, The Kiev Biennial, The Centre Pompidou, SAVVY Contemporary, The Gene Siskell Film Centre, Gasworks and Tate Britain. His work is in the public collection of the Centre National des Arts Plastiques, France and is distributed by Lux (UK) and Video Data Bank (USA).