Tribeca: 'Wavumba' and a Legend's Last Shark Hunt Kenya enchanted Jeroen van Velzen when his peripatetic family moved him there briefly as a child. In a fading fisherman on the country's coast, the Dutch filmmaker found an embodiment of both his dreams about the place and the point where rosy imaginings collide with reality. Mr. van Velzen's "Wavumba (They Who Smell of Fish)," showing at the Tribeca Film Festival on Wednesday and Thursday, is a kind of Africanized "Old Man and the Sea," with the septuagenarian fisherman, Masoud, trying to defy age and a streak of bad luck as he ventures ever farther into the Indian Ocean in search of giant prey. In his overview of the festival, the critic Stephen Holden called the film "a high point" of the documentary competition. Viewers ride along in an old wooden skiff with Masoud and his loyal but increasingly impatient grandson, a brawny young counterpoint to the disintegrating fisherman, as they paddle, bicker and hunt the kind of enormous sharks that made the old man's reputation as a big-game fisherman. Other scenes track the preparations - the anglers pull writhing octopuses (shark bait) from the shallows by hand and, in one unnerving segment, travel to an ominous island at night to hunt sea snakes by torchlight. Evocative sound design and interludes of Kenyan storytellers intoning myths about sea-dwelling spirits and hidden worlds wrap the film in a fantastical, impressionistic gauze, suggesting a place where "behind every stone might hide something special," Mr. van Velzen said. "I have these jumbled-up fantasies from when I was a child, and I wanted to re-grasp that sensation and have the viewer feel it," he said of his first feature-length film. I listened to all these stories and mixed them together with memories I had, and hoped for a romantic story to be unveiled. Mr. van Velzen, now 33, lives in Amsterdam but spent the past few months sailing along the southeastern coast of Africa in his own small, wooden boat. He discussed "Wavumba" by phone last week from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Here are edited excerpts from that conversation: The film is set on Wasini, a small island off the coast of Kenya. How did you find Masoud in such a remote place? There's a Dutchman living on the coast, he's a good friend of my father's. I used to work for him when I was 19 doing diving courses. He goes out on snorkeling trips every day, and when I told him about all these ideas and that I was looking for an old man who goes out to catch these big fish, he said, "You've got to meet this guy. When I go out at 11 a.m., he's already coming back and sometimes his canoe is too small for a giant shark, and he just ties it to the side of the boat. So he stood out from the other fishermen on Wasini? The fishermen there are more into net fishing and catching whatever they can, and if they catch their 10 kilos of small fish, they're happy with it. But he was always into game fishing - he really likes to show off his strength, I guess. He's just proud man, and he does it for a different reason, I think, because of that. He likes to see what he can go up against, even at his age. How did you convince him to let you tag along? He thought it was fantastic that I was there. Everybody on the island is kind of fed up with listening to his big stories, but here comes a filmmaker who wants to listen to the stories every day. His eyes are twinkling and he can't wait for the camera to turn on so he can tell all his memories from the past, though sometimes he gets muddled up because he is a old man. Was his fight against the end the main thing you wanted to explore? It was one of the things that just jumped out, Masoud's age. You just could not escape it. This old man wants to do one thing very much but his age is the conflict he has with himself. He's deteriorating. His struggle against his age was a beautiful contrast - it is a nice metaphor for trying to find something romantic in a world that is very realistic and tough. He tells lots of heroic stories about his fishing exploits. How concerned are you about their factual accuracy? I know he caught enormous fish and enormous sharks, especially, because others told me. If he told a lot of stories that I didn't believe, I wouldn't have been as taken with him. But I'm definitely not worried about how "real" something is or not - it's all about how you perceive the reality or how people tell a story. I knew that the stories they tell, they changed here and there and the details could become exaggerated. That's their culture. So the film was more about conveying a sense of Masoud's struggle and the magic of the place than being empirically accurate? I used whatever they gave me and, with a bit of nice editing and decoupage, you can make it more than it is, and maybe more romantic than it is. But the great thing is, when I showed the film in Wasini, everybody knew what it was about. They knew I twisted and condensed some things but there was still a kind of truth they can accept. The visible strain between Masoud and his grandson, Juma, seemed to be another theme, perhaps signaling the tension between the old and the young in a changing culture. I was hoping that would come through. Just looking at these two bodies together - this really old, disintegrated body next to this huge lump of muscle - you can imagine that Masoud really pretends to be like Juma, but he isn't. At the same, Masoud lives in this glorious way of seeing all these stories, and Juma doesn't really believe in them anymore. He has this more modern, realistic perspective. And then in the end, he really didn't want to go fishing anymore because they didn't catch anything for a long time. Do you know if there's been any resolution between them? When I went back to show the film, I learned that what we shot was actually the last time they ever fished together. What's more horrible is that Masoud never went out to fish for sharks again. He really needs someone because he's just too old to row and prepare stuff and get the boat out in the right place. He's never been again. So he stopped fishing? He still goes out every morning with a net and a small canoe. He goes out just about 50 meters just from his house and he throws out a net and doesn't catch anything. It's quite sweet.