Bay Area Premiere!
Allan Sekula in Person

Ports are “a theater of the world's connectedness,” says famed photographer and theorist Allan Sekula early in his admirable three-hour-long portrait of maritime culture. Packing a camcorder instead of a peacoat, Sekula sets forth on a salty voyage that takes him to Panama, Barcelona, Athens, New York City, Japan, and other locales that have a thriving seafaring life. Shipping law, the history of the Panama Canal, seaborne pollution, real estate speculation, the fate of stevedores, WTO protests are all critical cargo in a contained essay on the rising tide of global capital. Central to Lottery of the Sea is the notion that trade upon the pelagic is still a trade in “tangible goods,” a material fact that doesn't jibe with the weightless trafficking of information. The oceangoing life then becomes a safe-albeit romantic-harbor where resistance to piratical change is already implicit in its cultural myth. In one arresting episode, Galician volunteers meticulously clean an oil-oozing beach-it's as though the shoreline were being defended against an invasive wave of new capital.