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While Lobster Wars, a six-part reality TV series that ran on the Discovery Channel in 2007, followed fishermen from the United Kingdom pursuing crustaceans over Georges Bank, the feature Lobster War (singular) focuses on American and Canadian lobstermen pursuing the creatures around an island off Maine’s Down East that both countries claim.
Abel is screening Lobster War, which does not yet have a distributor, at venues around New England. The veteran print journalist’s current tour, which follows a round of film-festival appearances, is scheduled to begin in the fishing town of Gloucester, Mass., tonight and to make its Vermont premiere in Woodstock on Wednesday.
“My first two docs were on cable, on network distribution deals that hemmed us in except for the odd festival,” Abel, who writes about environmental issues for the Boston Globe, said during a telephone interview on Wednesday. “This is the first time I’ve decided to go the theater route.
“It’s really gratifying to show your work, to meet folks who are really interested in these issues.”
Climate change is the issue at the center of Lobster War, which documents a dispute between fishermen from Maine and Atlantic Canada. Over the last decade, with ocean waters warming off the New England coast, lobsters have been migrating north and east in search of colder waters for breeding, many of them are now clustering in a 277-square-mile patch of ocean described in the movie as a “Gray Zone” around Machias Seal Island.
“It was a way to show how climate change is not some distant, abstract threat,” Abel said. “It’s one that is having a very tangible effect on people’s lives very much in the present, not just decades down the line.”
To capture that effect, Abel and cinematographer Andy Laub spent months on lobster boats on both sides of the border, and interviewed scientists and government regulators.
“I was very grateful that the people we made the film about allowed us into their world, to tell the larger story,” Abel said. “I had written about it in the paper some years before, and it wasn’t a story that a lot of the fishermen appreciated because they weren’t eager to broadcast the conflict. At the same time, they understood that we were trying to take a lot more time than I could with a 1,200-word story.”
Lobster War is the second collaboration between Abel and Laub, who had taken one of Abel’s print-journalism classes at Emerson College. In 2015, they shot Sacred Cod: The Fight for a New England Tradition, which the Discovery Channel broadcast in 2016.
“I’d been writing about the fishing industry for a while, and found it kind of a challenging world to plunge into,” Abel said. “There’s so much jargon involved with the regulations, and there are all kinds of vying perspectives to try to cover. There’s a human drama and an environmental drama that sometimes collide. I’d written 800 words here, 1,000 words there and I felt like there was a broader story, a wider narrative to tell.”
The New York City-born Abel has been telling stories in print since the 1990s, in a career that includes a stint as an general assignment reporter for The Palm Beach Post and then several years of freelancing for a variety of publications, on stories ranging from wars in the Balkans to Hugo Chavez’ rise to power in Venezuela.
And during his first few years at the Globe, he clung to a print reporter’s “prejudice against anything that had someone mugging for the camera, particularly in TV news.”
That all changed at the Boston Marathon in 2013. For a Nieman Fellowship project at Harvard, he was following 3-foot-9 Juli Windsor, a woman with dwarfism, in her attempt to run the full 26.2-miles. With Windsor half a mile from the finish in Copley Square, the two bombs planted by the infamous Tsarnaev brothers exploded, killing three spectators and wounding dozens. In the ensuing chaos, Abel posted the first online report on the Globe website and then wrote a first-person story that was part of the Globe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the attack.
“And when the bombs went off,” he recalled, “I was still wearing a camera.”
Abel returned to Windsor’s story, first with the documentary 25.7: In Twice the Steps, which ran on the cable channel Pivot. A year after the bombing, Able ran the full Boston course with Windsor, filming her along the way for Undaunted: Chasing History at the Boston Marathon, which BBC World News and the Discovery Life channel both ran.
“From there,” Abel said, “I just sort of kept going.”
He added that the Globe has given him the flexibility to moonlight on film projects that dovetail with his print work.
“Filmmaking is a skill I’m still learning,” Abel said. “Going back and forth between the mediums is still a work in progress.
“I kind of want to have a foot in both worlds as long as I can.”
Pentangle Arts screens
Our ‘Times’
Even though I saw Page One: Inside the New York Times shortly after its release in 2011, I’m tempted to revisit the documentary next week, when the Woodstock Vermont Film Series screens it at 3 and 5:30 p.m. on Jan. 12 at Billings Farm and Museum.
In addition to the day-in-the-life approach to revealing the many dilemmas and decisions that go into putting out a paper, all while trying to stay afloat in the midst of the Great Recession and the disorienting changes wrought by the internet, Page One, filmed in 2010, revolves around the world view of David Carr, the veteran journalist who recovered from drug addiction to become the Times’ acclaimed media columnist. Carr died of pneumonia, at age 59, in 2015, lending the film a deeper poignancy.
To reserve tickets ($6 to $11) and learn more about the film series, visit billingsfarm.org/filmfest or call 802-457-2355.
Coming Attractions
The digital projector at Spaulding Auditorium resumes running this weekend, starting tonight at 7 with a screening of the new iteration of A Star is Born in Spaulding Auditorium.
And on Saturday night at 7 comes the vertigo-inducing documentary Free Solo, about mountain climber Alex Honnold’s 2017 climb, without ropes or pitons or other aids, of the 3,000-foot face of Yosemite National Park’s El Capitan. The cinematographer was Jimmy Chin, who shot the even more-harrowing Meru, during two expeditions to a 21,000-foot peak in India’s Himalayas.
For tickets ($5 to $8) to each film, visit hop.dartmouth.edu or call 603-646-2422.
David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com. Movie and TV news also can be sent to highlights@vnews.com.
Correction
Cinematographer Andy Laub collaborated with journalist Da vid Abel on the documentary Lobster War. An earlier version of this preview misspelled Laub’s last name.