Mulheres do Mar: The Women Who Inherit the Sea

On the island of Faial, the sea is not background but condition. It decides departures, moods, and livelihoods. The tide, the fog, the sudden silence before a storm — these are not metaphors but forms of knowledge. In the Azores, to understand life is to understand water.

In Mulheres do Mar – Açores, a new documentary by filmmaker Raquel Martins and the NGO Help Images, the ocean becomes both setting and subject. The film gathers the voices of forty-nine Azorean women whose lives unfold in proximity to the sea. They are scientists, divers, teachers, fishers, and artists. More than seventy women contributed to the project, forming a collective portrait of those who sustain an archipelago suspended between continents.

A geography of belonging

The Azores’ nine islands sit in the mid-Atlantic, distant from both Lisbon and New York but connected to the currents that link hemispheres. Life there has always required negotiation with isolation. The sea is transportation, food, employment, but also intimacy — a daily encounter with immensity.

Martins’s camera traces this encounter without the distance of conventional documentary. She films slowly, often from the water’s edge or below its surface, letting the rhythm of waves determine pacing. There are no interviews or infographics, only gestures, fragments, and faces. The women appear in their environments — mending nets, steering small boats, studying marine life — as if the camera had always been part of their routine.

Reframing what care means

In most maritime narratives, men dominate the frame: sailors, fishermen, explorers. Mulheres do Mar reverses this gaze. Its focus is not on conquest but continuity — the invisible, repetitive, sustaining work that ties a community to its ecosystem.

Across the islands, women have long been central to this relationship. Some manage small-scale fisheries; others conduct marine research or guide visitors through protected areas. Many teach children the ethics of conservation long before policy reaches the classroom. The film positions these forms of care as environmental practice — a slow, embodied stewardship rather than an abstract activism.

The project also touches on global dimensions. Women make up a small minority of registered seafarers worldwide but perform most of the unacknowledged labor that supports maritime economies. By documenting their stories, Martins expands the vocabulary of conservation, suggesting that biodiversity and gender equity are inseparable parts of the same conversation.

The emotional register of the ocean

The film avoids moral instruction. Instead, it allows emotion — that quality so often dismissed in environmental discourse — to surface naturally. Its soundscape combines the hum of wind, underwater acoustics, and human breath. The images are tactile: skin against salt, fabric drying on volcanic rock, the glimmer of plankton under shifting light.

The result feels closer to an elegy than to an advocacy film. It suggests that the ocean’s protection begins not with legislation but with recognition — of dependence, memory, and vulnerability. The sea in Mulheres do Mar is not an object of rescue but a living mirror, reflecting the same fragility that defines the human world.

A movement beyond the islands

After premiering in Faial’s Teatro Faialense in July 2025, the film travels next to Lisbon for the National Conference on Ocean Literacy. The initiative forms part of a broader project by Help Images, which aims to record the experiences of women connected to the sea in more than thirty countries. The Azores serve as its first Atlantic chapter — a place where local knowledge meets planetary urgency.

For Martins, the project represents a convergence of art, science, and memory. It transforms testimony into visual language and expands the notion of what environmentalism looks like when narrated from the periphery.

The patience of water

There is a quiet rhythm that runs through Mulheres do Mar. It resists speed, embraces repetition, and moves with the certainty of tides. The film’s power lies not in argument but in attention — in making visible a continuity that modern life prefers to overlook.

In the end, Martins’s work feels less like a documentary and more like a ritual of listening. It shows that the bond between women and the sea is not simply historical or symbolic, but ongoing — a conversation carried by wind, salt, and persistence.

Mulheres do Mar – Açores
Directed by Raquel Martins. Produced by Help Images with support from the Government of the Azores. Premiered in July 2025 at Teatro Faialense, Horta; screening November 7, 2025, at the Conferência Nacional de Literacia do Oceano in Lisbon.