From Omeleto.
A woman goes to the ocean.
AND THE OCEAN AGREED is used with permission from Tanya Modini. Learn more at https://tanyamodini.com.
Vina is an elderly woman with dementia, living in a nursing home. Her memories of the past are all but gone, and she exists only in the haze of the present tense.
But when her family takes her on a rare outing to the ocean, the beautiful setting awakens her to something she hasn’t felt in a while: her true self.
Directed and written by Tanya Modini, this richly textured short drama portrays a woman lost to herself, caught in the ravages of time, age and illness. Opening with a startling sequence of a singer entertaining a mostly unaware audience in Vina’s nursing home, it makes clear that life is a desultory, soul-muffling affair. Vina is seemingly unaware of it all, caught in the thickets of dementia, though she still manages to paint scenes of swimming in the ocean. Seeing the images, Vina’s visiting granddaughter Evie decides to take Vina to the ocean to swim.
The film’s storytelling is mostly a naturalistic affair, and the visuals have a tactile, sensuously rich quality, immersing us in the voluptuous physical details of the world. Through the luminous cinematography, we can feel the cool breezes in the air and the salt and sand of the beach. It captures how enlivening and vibrant the sensory experience is, and it’s not surprising that the ocean seems to awaken Vina in some way. Her memory is still mixed up, but she’s somehow more present and alive, a change captured beautifully by actor Chrissy Page’s performance.
The immersion into water awakens Vina on many levels, and even her dreams are affected. The dialogue is mostly sparse and functional, but the rich visuals and compelling performances — including those of actors Jacy Lewis and Jazz Zhao as Vina’s daughter and granddaughter, respectively — add an unspoken emotional richness and deepen the film’s explorations of aging, selfhood and dementia. Vina feels most like herself in the water, swimming with the currents and waves; when she returns to the nursing home, she finds herself unsettled and frightened. Though physically safe and secure, she finds she can’t resist the pull of the ocean — and the truth she finds in it.
Lyrical, earthy and emotionally intimate, AND THE OCEAN AGREED captures no less than how Vina experiences herself — her dim awareness that there is something not quite right in her present, the way her memories of the past leak into her present and brings something of her essential, vibrant self back. It captures how the self can be a tangle of memory, sensory detail, present awareness and inchoate emotion, and how fragile the connections can be between these dimensions. But we are always pulled to where we feel most immersed in our truth, as tenuous as it is.
