Beneath the Baltic Sea’s calm surface lies a wounded world, still burdened by the weapons of war.

“I think it is a torpedo.” Against a beautiful, tranquil shoreline, these opening words immediately unsettle our gaze. Some 1.6 million tons of unexploded military munitions were dumped into the Baltic and North Seas after two World Wars.

Filmed across several Baltic Sea countries, “Baltic UXO” moves through German, Russian, Polish, Latvian and Estonian voices, yet its true protagonist is the sea itself: a wounded creature struggling to breathe, its depths burdened by the remnants of war. In the tradition of Baltic poetic cinema, haunting images replace conventional narration: a seal’s near-mummified body, blood-red sunsets, blue-black tides and murky seabed strewn with explosives. Fishermen return with a single box of vimba; women’s hands monotonously prepare Riga sprats. Even amber, that familiar fragment of frozen sunlight, may be dangerous to touch. The people who locate and neutralise the explosives remain peripheral. Their quiet work only reveals the scale of what lies beneath. When the film finally allows us to breathe and contemplate familiar seascapes, we can no longer see them with innocent eyes.

Marianna Kaat