Sea Country

2025 | Coast Film & Music Festival

Duration: 15 min

Synopisis

From a remote tropical archipelago off northern Australia, the island of Masig is taking the fight against climate change to the world stage. Home to just 300 people, Masig offers an idyllic way of life — but like many small islands in the South Pacific and beyond, it now faces an uncertain future.

As global temperatures rise, the effects are already being felt across Masig and the surrounding Sea Country — a vast oceanic realm where spirits, stories, and living beings converge. For 65,000 years, the islanders’ ancestors have cared for Sea Country. Today, they find themselves on the front line of the climate crisis, with no choice but to act.

Sea Country (Malu Lag) follows Tishiko King — a marine biologist and proud Kulkalaig woman — from her island home to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Dubai, exploring the healing power of the ocean, cultural resilience, and one woman’s fight to save her home.

Featured at Coast Film & Music Festival 2025

Production Team

Nicole Gormley is an award-winning filmmaker, photographer, and ocean advocate dedicated to telling stories that deepen our understanding and connection to the natural world. She has directed and produced projects for Netflix, PBS, Discovery Channel, and National Geographic, and received the Tribeca Film Festival Award for Best New Documentary Director for her debut feature, Searching for Amani.

Nicole is also the co-author and photographer of Kimi’s Kitchen: An Ocean Woman’s Guide to Wild Cooking, created with Hawai‘i-born spearfishing champion and chef Kimi Werner. Both a deeply personal biography and a collection of more than 80 recipes, the book celebrates wild cooking, sustainability, and the interconnection between people, place, and sea.