By Ajith Lawrence
Thiruvananthapuram, May 16, 2025: The fisherman I recall best from the mist of time stood still on a wind-swept sand dune near India’s southern tip.
Bare-chested, wrapped in a plaid sarong, looking as if carved from dark granite, he stood there, his gaze fixed on the faraway line where the sea meets the sky. A lord of the waves, preparing for one more ride over the rollers on his kattumaram—a humble raft of bound logs, shaped by hand, driven by sheer muscle power.
These solo raft-riders are a vanishing breed, their ways obscured by the drone of motorized fiberglass boats. But in Cashing Waves, they come alive—alongside diverse traditional fishers—free divers, shore seiners, boatmen, hook-and-line experts. Together, they share a world shaped by tide and toil, ever closer to the edge in a warming globe.
Shot along the fabled coastline of Thiruvananthapuram, capital of Kerala state where the Western Ghats begins its descend to meet the Arabian Sea, this documentary immerses us in the work life of a community of over 50,000 seagoing fishermen and their families.
Their place is spread across 42 villages bordering a 79-km-long narrow strip comprising scenic, sandy, rocky, estuarine, built-up, carved-out and eroded stretches. A living frontier—vivid, raw, and increasingly perilous as climate change tilts the odds.
The fly-on-the-wall camera, unintrusive yet intimate, moves with the rhythm of the coast. It watches as fishers rise before dawn, prepare their nets, push their craft into an unforgiving sea. It lingers on to etch quiet moments of uncertainty, judgment and resolve, then zooms headlong into scenes of fury. One moment, a misty lagoon comes alive on the screen, bustling mangroves on its fringes; the next, a man times his leap from his raft, trying to outswim a chasing wave.
There is Richard of Puthenthope—a solo fisherman on a raft—who recounts calmly how the surf nearly dashed him against his own vessel. And Blassey, an elder, makes a quiet transition to a fiberglass raft.
Yet Cashing Waves is no lament or a litany of woes. It is a chronicle of survival, adaptation, innovation. In its second half, the story turns inland—to the radar labs of the Cochin University of Science and Technology, where meteorologists like Prof. Abhilash S. join hands with scientist-fishers like Kumar Sahayaraju. Together, they craft a forecast system built not merely of models and satellite observations, but also WhatsApp messages, radio warnings, and human trust.
Observations from the sea—wind shifts, swell heights, cloud patterns—flow back into the models. Risk communication becomes a shared language.
That, the scientists say, is the how forecasts should look like in future – telling users what weather will do, not what it will be. Such forecasts tailormade for diverse users is all the more relevant when the Arabian Sea is turning stormier with its warming waters and a humid lower atmosphere that is also warming.
Fishing forays are becoming even riskier under such weather conditions. Director John Bennet and Cinematographer Vincy Lopez, however, steer clear of nostalgia or melodrama. What they give us instead is something sturdier: a textured, clear-eyed portrait of life on the edge. Brutally frank.
And the narrator Edmond Roy’s voice reflects that professional objectivity. The cinematography is as moody, muted and mercurial in turns as the ocean it portrays. We sway with the rhythm of boats breasting the surf. We see the sudden fury of a storm snuff out livelihoods in a flash.
Sound becomes the film’s heartbeat in the backdrop of Ivan Pereira’s evocative music.
In the end, Cashing Waves is not just a film about fishing. It is a meditation on survival, dignity, and resilience. And some inevitable moments of grief.