The next Post Office scandal? Meet the fishermen fighting an ecocide

If a dramatisation were ever to be made of film-maker Jeanie Finlay’s brilliant, infuriating, charming documentary All Rivers Spill Their Stories to the Sea, number one on the agenda would be the casting of its indefatigable protagonist, Hartlepool fisherman Stan Rennie. Timothy Spall, perhaps, or Stephen Graham – someone capable of playing a beloved everyman, warm and no-nonsense, with a quick wit and a big heart.

Finlay’s films have attracted audiences (and awards) for her nuanced and poetic portraits of disparately interesting people. They are patient, character-led explorations, rather than rushed explanations. Previous subjects include Aubrey Gordon, the self-described “very fat” author (Your Fat Friend, 2023); a pregnant transgender man (Seahorse, 2019); and the alter ego of the possibly undead Elvis (Orion, 2015). 

A Teessider herself, Finlay’s 11th feature chronicles Rennie’s fight to eliminate the industrial pollution that is decimating the ecosystem of the north-east coast, jeopardising the centuries-old livelihood of a proud community. He is supported by the 60 other fishers who constitute the North East Fishing Collective (NEFC). Rennie explains – both in the film and in an interview with the Nerve – that he’s been fishing for 48 years, and his family’s involvement in the industry goes back “four, five hundred years”.

This is an ongoing David v Goliath battle. Rennie, the NEFC and a gang of independent research scientists – in addition to local residents – fill the former role, while various government agencies and Tees Valley mayor Ben Houchen fill the latter. (Houchen, who has a smug appearance reminiscent of a character from the game Guess Who?, has since become Lord Houchen, in what may be the definitive definition of failing upwards.)

Initial reaction to the film has been unanimously positive. It has received awards from the Bristol documentary film festival and the Mediterrane film festival, critic Mark Kermode has called it “a powerful story told with poetry and humour”, and journalist Tina Brown proclaimed it “one of the most moving, thrilling and fantastic documentaries I have ever seen”, anointing Rennie as “the next Mr Bates” (in reference to the postmaster who doggedly campaigned for accountability and compensation after the Horizon scandal).

The story begins in September 2021 with startling, scarcely fathomable footage of a 60-mile-long “die-off”: a shoreline carpeted with dead, or dying, marine life. Crabs on their backs, the ones still alive convulsing; flaccid starfish mixed in with rotten kelp; decomposing crayfish and lobsters. Later, we’ll be informed by Dr Sue Wilson at the Tara Seal Research Centre that every single seal pup in the bay has also perished. 

“It’s like something out of a horror film,” resident Sharon Bell says, surveying the beach. Bell tries to return the surviving crustaceans to the water. “I thought I was doing the right thing”, she says, after the fact, “but I didn’t know what I was putting them back into.” The die-offs continue throughout the four years covered in the documentary – and go on still.

When Rennie and his colleagues take their boats out, they pull their pots from the water to find them mostly empty. Rennie’s catches are down 80%. John Wallace, a prawn fisher, has gone from eight baskets a day to two. The cost of diesel often exceeds what the fishers can earn from such meagre hauls – not least because they are having to take their vessels much farther out to find anything alive. Rennie is also uncomfortable with putting potentially diseased animals into the food chain.

He ends up as a quasi-counsellor to grown men with drawn faces, near tears, because they are struggling to keep their heads above water. People have mortgages to pay, kids to feed. Many, including Rennie himself, have put their boats up for sale. But nobody is buying. “And I have three [boats], so I’m proper up to my neck in it,” one fisherman remarks in a meeting held at the local pub – the kind of gallows humour recurrent in the film. 

There’s plenty of dry northern badinage, and Rennie has a number of Stan-isms. When his health deteriorates – he is under immense stress – he remarks that he is “sick as a chip”. Finlay tells me she had the phrase printed on tote bags to give to the cast and crew after filming wrapped.

The locals, who understand the sea like Lionel Messi understands a football pitch, suspect they know what is causing the die-offs: the river dredging for Teesside’s new freeport. Dredging removes accumulated, decades-dormant sediment, via scraping or suction, to create deeper channels in order to facilitate shipping. This sediment, known as “spoil”, is then disposed of (aka dumped) at sea. The sediment around the Tees’s mouth is full of industrial pollutants; a legacy of the area’s former heavy industry. Up to 20,000 people were employed in the steelworks and chemical factories of Redcar before the Thatcher reforms. A mother in 1970s footage relays her son becoming ill after playing on the beach, acquiring “blisters larger than half a crown”.

Freeports (special economic zones with different tax and customs rules to encourage trade) were the previous Tory administration’s post-Brexit flagship “levelling up” initiative. You may recall news clips of Boris Johnson and a rictus-grinned Rishi Sunak waterside in hard hats and hi-vis vests. The greatest hits of the freeports project to date include: rewarding a firm that had just illegally fired 800 workers with a contract for the Thames port; potentially facilitating organised crime and the import of drugs and guns; and the alleged transfer of assets from public ownership to private enterprise at dirt-cheap prices. Quite aside from the die-offs, Houchen’s freeport has been investigated for corruption; a report cleared the project of wrongdoing but condemned its lack of transparency and made 28 recommendations, many relating to governance.  

Finlay captures the mushroom clouds of debris as decommissioned industrial infrastructure across 4,500 acres – Britain’s largest brownfield site – is summarily demolished to make way for what will become “Teesworks”. Shortly after these contaminated structures on contaminated land have been blown up, the first die-off occurs. Around the same time, a large dredger named the Orca begins work. Two million tonnes of sediment is disturbed. Houchen, along with government agencies, insists neither the demolitions nor the dredging is related to the sudden bulk of shellfish carcasses.

Initially, the Environment Agency, a Defra-sponsored quango, blames an “algal bloom” for the die-off. The government agencies supply a version of events which grows more egregious as the film progresses. After the algae theory is disproved, the ostensible catalyst switches to “a unique novel pathogen” – as if the existence of a unique novel pathogen washing up on British shores wouldn’t be so alarming that it might result in, say, a Cobra meeting, rather than a governmental shrug of the shoulders. Houchen at one point even tries to pin the mass deaths on “rough seas”, and misidentifies thousands of stranded mussels as “coal deposits”; this – and despite them clearly being mussels – is a massive self-own, given that coal deposits are carcinogenic.

Ignored and patronised, the NEFC crowd-fund an independent scientific study by researchers from Hull, Durham, York and Newcastle universities. The study backs the fishers’ claims that toxins are most likely responsible: PCBs (so-called “forever chemicals”), poisonous metals, and, most notably, the volatile “super-dissolver” chemical pyridine. A freedom of information request discovers even the government’s own data shows levels of pyridine present in the estuary’s crustaceans are 70 times higher than those from other areas. 

I ask the industrious Rennie about his thoughts on the future: whether he thinks the new Labour government will make a positive intervention. He says Labour Hartlepool MP Jonathan Brash, who is supportive, is endeavouring to set up a meeting with environment secretary Angela Eagle. Finlay hopes All Rivers… will be screened in parliament. Water quality has become an increasingly prevalent concern among the public, as open-water swimming has doubled in popularity in the last decade (Finlay’s mother swims thrice weekly off the north-east coast: “I’m trying to get her to stop…”), and newspapers report water companies discharging tonnes of sewage into the sea. 

A few years ago, Rennie voted Tory for the first time. Would he do so again, Finlay inquires, near the beginning of the picture. “No,” comes the immediate answer. He tells me that he “wouldn’t trust them as far as I could throw them”. And yet, to the fishers’ dismay, we watch Houchen win a third term as mayor in 2024 after what is essentially a populist campaign of Make Teesside Great Again. “And we were sold down the river with Brexit,” Rennie adds (70% of Hartlepool voted for Brexit).  

This is an important film, but also a visually arresting one, with chiaroscuro-esque underwater shots of iridescent lobsters, accompanied by a charged score by Lomond Campbell. It conveys, too, the spirit of humanity; and it celebrates a dedication to truth, transparency, justice. I ask Finlay about the title. “This kind of story is tidal,” she says. “It will all come out in the wash…”

All Rivers Spill Their Stories to the Sea will be in UK cinemas from 23 October

Photography by Jeanie Finlay, Adam Mendum and Andy Martin