The Oceans Are the Real Continents

Director Tommaso Santambrogio’s beautifully realized first feature, Oceans Are the Real Continents, presents a number of intriguing paradoxes: It’s both grounded in realism and highly stylized, like a social documentary shot by a first-class photographer.

If this is cinema as poetry, these are verses made to be framed and admired, rather than sung or felt.

Filmed with marvelous attention to subtle contrasts possible in its monochromatic palette, the frames brim with a built-in timelessness.

Oceans Are the Real Continents is a beautiful, bittersweet love letter to a place and a people that remain irrevocably intertwined even in separation.