Nota Bene

The Queen Elizabeth 2 made her first crossing to New York in 1969. In 1992 she is the last ocean liner on the Atlantic, no longer a means of transport but a floating town of 1,500 passengers. A crew of 1,200, among them Captain Warwick, keeps her running day and night. From Southampton to New York, nearly 3,000 people live together for five days in a kind of complicity: first the unpredictable ocean, then New York, far away like a New World.

In the North Sea some sixty thousand people live offshore. On the F.G. McClintock drilling rig, eighty men and one woman work around the clock in search of black gold, while a stand-by vessel circles them for their safety. In such a closed space, facing the wild sea, there is little room to say how one feels. “The noise is everywhere, you can’t get away from it,” says Brian Spencer, the toolpusher. After Nord Express and the Queen Elizabeth 2, Rob Rombout films another small society behind closed doors.

In Perm, an isolated city in the snowbound Urals, a festival named after Robert Flaherty, Flahertiana, brings together some forty Russian directors to take stock of documentary cinema. The debates are heated, at minus twenty-five degrees, and between the interviews their own films answer back. Rob Rombout is the only foreign filmmaker at this “international” festival. He is on a special Perm-mission.