Boatbuilders review – a gentle study of craftsmen’s quiet expertise

Venice film festival: Luke Lorentzen’s light-touch documentary follows a team of Maine craftsmen constructing a high-spec sailboat for a super-rich guy who seems kind of nice The Brooklin Boat Yard stands in a quiet harbour on the coast of Maine and makes high-spec yachts for rich men and women to sail. Its latest client is Graham Green, a millionaire financier who has commissioned the team to build him a 56ft cruising sailboat, the Kiandra, complete with maple worktops and a Sonos sound system. Green plans to sail the boat around the world, while its creators will stay in Brooklin, raise their kids and make boats. These men know their place. “We’re just the fucking help,” one confides. Boatbuilders is directed with the lightest of touches by 33-year-old Luke Lorentzen, who has already proved himself a past master in unhurried, observational documentaries about work. Midnight Family , his 2019 debut, spotlighted the travails of a private ambulance business in Mexico City, while 2023’s A Still Small Voice trailed a chaplain at Mount Sinai hospital in New York. Neither, though, immersed themselves in their subject to quite the level of Boatbuilders, which covers the process from lumber cutting to launch and from one summer through to the following spring. The leaves turn to gold, then the snow starts to fly, but down at the boatyard the job continues on schedule. The craftsmen plane and glue and discuss their lives. Continue reading...