Sue Kim first encountered the inspiration for her new film “The Last of the Sea Women,” which arrives Friday on Apple TV+, when she was an 8-year-old from a Detroit suburb vacationing with her family in South Korea.
Although much of that trip was spent visiting relatives in Seoul, the filmmaker’s parents took her and her brother for fun to Jeju island, which she describes as “sort of … the Hawaii of Korea: It’s very tropical, it’s beautiful, it’s coastal.” There, she saw the women divers known as the haenyeo, who were carrying on the centuries-old tradition of harvesting seafood from the ocean floor.
“I remember just seeing this very large gaggle of women in their wet suits, walking to the cove and getting ready to go into the water. I didn’t know who they were. No one had explained to me who they were, so I just remember being so struck by them. They were so imposing-looking in their wet suits and their masks, just gearing up for underwater battle basically,” says Kim.
Bold. Confident. Strong. Loud and funny, too. These “feisty grandmother warriors,” as Apple TV+ puts it, swim without oxygen and instead free dive by holding their breath for up to two minutes. Some have referred to them as mermaids in real life.
Now that most of the haenyeo are seniors in their 60s, 70s or older, the continuity of their community is endangered. So are the waters they feel it is their mission to protect, what with climate change, the rise of man-made sea garbage and the controversy over the release of radioactive wastewater from Japan’s tsunami-ravaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean.
“The Last of the Sea Women” is a tribute to these heroic women who are fearlessly speaking truth to power and inspiring younger people to embrace their values.
Directed by Kim, the documentary aims to capture the culture of the tight-knight haenyeo community and its sense of purpose and commitment. As one of its member says: “Even when it’s cold or we don’t feel like diving, we still dive. It’s in our bones. We are women, after all.” The beauty and skill of the work they do is captured by underwater cinematographer Justin Turkowski.
The film makes visible the power of women who’ve reached the age when they tend to become invisible. A portion of the story follows one of the haenyeo women as she travels to Switzerland and courageously speaks in defense of the oceans before the United Nations.
As IndieWire wrote, Kim’s straightforward style allows the haenyeo and their message to be the film's focus and lets “their passionate pleas for a better future to ring out as a clarion call for all of us.”
The documentary represents the launch of Malala Yousafzai’s career as a movie producer. The Nobel Peace Prize winner and global advocate for girls and women attended the documentary’s world premiere in September at the 2024 Toronto Film Festival.
For Kim, “The Last of the Sea Women” is the culmination of decades of fascination with the subject and years of effort to get the project off the ground.
During a Zoom interview, she talks about being born and raised in Southfield and considering herself a Michigander. “That’s my hometown,” she says. “That was my true childhood and upbringing, and I loved it. I had a pretty idyllic childhood, so I look back on my time in Detroit and Michigan with so much fondness.”
According to Kim, her parents moved from South Korea to the Detroit area for her mother’s work in the medical field. Kim attended Southfield Christian School for elementary and junior high school. When she reached 10th grade, the family moved to San Diego.
Kim says her parents made a concerted effort to keep her connected to Korean culture. She grew up eating Korean food and went to a Korean church and Korean school on weekends. Her family lived with her grandmother, who spoke only Korean to her.
“What was wonderful about living in the Detroit area is (it) has a very large Korean population, so we were very involved in that. … As far as a diasporic community, metropolitan Detroit had a really wonderful one for preserving tradition and cultural identity,” she says.
Kim also loved McDonald’s, Saturday morning cartoons and other staples of American pop culture. She says she feels blessed by being exposed to two different worlds at such a young age. “Like most Korean American children, I had a combination of two different cultures growing up and a combination of two different identities.”
The University of California, Berkely alum spent much of her career in the advertising world making content for huge brands before switching to directing documentaries. Her 2020 short film “The Speed Cubers,” which chronicled Rubik’s Cube champs, earned a Peabody Award nomination and landed on the short list for the Oscars.
Kim says she remained “super, super fascinated” by the haenyeo as an adult and started going back to Jeju Island to talk to the women there. The idea of putting them on film became a priority, she explains, because of their ages and dwindling numbers.
“This generation is likely to be the last generation of the haenyeo, so it became really, all of a sudden, urgent to tell their story while they were still here and could tell it in their own words.”
Kim spent about six years pitching the project to various studios with no luck. “Everyone acknowledged that the haenyeo were very interesting and a story worthy of telling, but I couldn’t quite get funding for it. I couldn’t quite convince a studio to green-light it. A lot of the feedback I got was although this story is fascinating, it felt too niche, too specific to this small island off the coast of South Korea.”
Eventually, Kim says, she almost gave up trying. “Basically, I had kind of abandoned this project. I had put it on a shelf in my mind. … And then Malala had just started her production company.”
The Extracurricular production company, founded in 2021 by Yousafzai, saw the value and potential of the film’s universal themes of environmentalism and empowerment. Kim says the president of the company at the time reached out to her with a pertinent question. ”She wanted to know if there was any story that I was dying to tell,” says Kim with a smile.
With Yousafzai aboard, everything else fell into place. A top indie film company, A24, signed on. So did Apple TV+, which has a programming partnership with Yousafzai. Filming officially started in 2022. It was like an impossible dream coming true for Kim.
“Until Malala came on board, it was very hard to get this made,” she says.
At a time when post-menopausal women still are stereotyped as dependent and frail, Kim’s film is a refreshing reality check. It depicts the haenyeo in all of their determination and vitality.
“I absolutely relished and loved the idea of making a film where not only were all the heroes in the film women, not only were all the heroes in the film Asian women, which is very rare to find, but — and this was the clincher for me — all the heroes in this film are elderly Asian women. … I loved that our film really uplifts and makes aspirational a community of women that is rarely seen as heroic and empowered and strong and fearless,” she says.
Kim says the making the documentary had a deep impact on her and the rest of the crew. “Every single day we were with them, we were inspired. We joke that we were the crying crew. Every single day, we were crying behind the cameras in some way because something touched us or was moving. Or we were giggling behind the cameras because they’re so funny and they’re so brash and bold and so unapologetic about who they are.”
When asked how the experience made her feel about the future, Kim says she has hope that young people will be inspired by the message of the haenyeo and help their tradition survive. The big picture is more daunting.
“Making this film really did drive home to me the environmental destruction that we are committing to our oceans and to this planet," she says. "I saw firsthand and heard firsthand how devastating the impact has been on global warming and climate change. … I don’t know if I’m optimistic that we, as a species, will change our ways and take better care of our planet, but what I do take inspiration from is we’re talking about it.
“Maybe," she continues, "we can have more conversations that actually will lead to change.”
Contact Detroit Free Press pop culture critic Julie Hinds at jhinds@freepress.com.
'The Last of the Sea Women'
Arrives Friday on Apple TV+
Rated TV-PG
1 hour, 26 minutes
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: South Korean senior women divers defy aging stereotypes in Detroit native's film
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