How Deep Is Your Love
DIR. ELEANOR MORTIMER • UNITED KINGDOM, 2025, 100 MINS
ENGLISH WITH CAPTIONS FOR HARD OF HEARING
Sunday 22 November
7 - 8.45pm
Doors open 6.30pm
TICKETS ON A SLIDING SCALE
£8 / £6 / £3
See our Sliding Scale Ticket Guide for rate information
Each ticket includes
a complimentary refreshment
A visually hypnotic journey into the deep sea, exploring the extraordinary life found in one of the least understood places on Earth – and the fragile relationship between discovery and protection.
Far out on the open sea, an expedition vessel travels towards the Clarion–Clipperton Zone, one of the most remote regions on Earth. Twelve days from the nearest land, beneath the surface, darkness and immense depths conceal an extraordinary and largely unexplored world.
How Deep Is Your Love follows a group of marine biologists as they seek to understand the life inhabiting this deep-sea environment. As they make their discoveries, they are also faced with a difficult question: might their presence risk harming the very world they hope to protect? Combining remarkable underwater imagery with a growing sense of urgency, Eleanor Mortimer’s film offers a deeply absorbing portrait of a fragile ecosystem, and asks us to reconsider our place within the living world.
The Clarion–Clipperton Zone lies in the Pacific Ocean, far beyond the reach of most human experience. Its deep seabed is home to an astonishing variety of life, much of it still unknown to science. Yet this remote environment is increasingly under threat from the prospect of deep-sea mining, raising urgent questions about how we understand, value and protect ecosystems that remain largely unseen.
With its attention to the intricate forms and patterns of marine life, the film offers a different way of looking at the natural world: one that makes space for curiosity and wonder, while remaining alert to the consequences of human activity. It resonates with themes explored in Aimée Parrott’s current exhibition, The green fuse drives the flower, where biological and ecological processes, transformation and the interconnectedness of living things are recurring concerns.
Eleanor Mortimer (she, her) is a queer British documentary director whose films explore the living world and the magic of the everyday through a feminist lens.
Her BFI- and Sandbox-supported debut feature, How Deep Is Your Love (2025), which follows scientists on a two-month voyage to the deep Pacific, premiered at True/False Film Festival and won Best Documentary at Seoul International Eco Film Festival.
Her short films have screened internationally, including at Sundance Film Festival (Territory, 2016), won awards at Hot Docs, Provincetown International Film Festival, and Festival dei Popoli for Bubble (2017). Her work has been featured by Nowness, The New York Times (Seafarers, 2018), Channel 4 Random Acts (Bird, 2019), and Vimeo Staff Picks.
Living between Folkestone and her narrowboat in London, Eleanor is currently developing work exploring water as a space for cinematic imagination and political possibility.
