Holyhead

The Irish Sea crossing is usually described as the distance between two places. Holyhead treats it as a place: a few hours of territory with its own surfaces, timings and rules, and its own way of sorting the people moving through it.

Very little on the route is incidental. The terminal admits freight and passengers into the same building on different terms. The order in which the decks are filled decides the order of arrival. The paperwork begins well before the water does. A crossing is an administrative sequence that happens to involve the sea, and the ship is the part of it you are allowed to walk around in.

The film holds instead on what the sequence cannot organise. The wake, which is the only part of the ship not running to a timetable. The gulls that follow the stern for exactly as long as there is a reason to. The hours in which several hundred people agree, without discussing it, to be nowhere in particular — reading, sleeping, queueing for coffee, watching a coastline that is not yet the one they are going to.

Arrival is a port before it is a city. Gantry cranes, a feeder ship, stacked boxes lit for work that continues whether or not anyone has come ashore. The passenger and the container are handled by the same infrastructure a few hundred metres apart, and only one of them is expected to notice. The crossing ends where the paperwork does.