Luisa

Eras

• First There Was the Ocean, "Before the filmmaking, before the investigations, before all the fighting, there was the ocean. I moved to the coast to surf." Four months working a surf camp in Andalucía, daily walks on the same beach, a lighthouse she kept photographing, and captions that read more like poetry than posts. Everything after this grows out of it.
• Two-Month Mission, "I signed up for a 2-month-only mission in Norway", that was six years ago. In The Same Boat cleans the Norwegian and Arctic coastline from sailboats: volunteers live aboard for weeks at a time in some of the most remote and weather-exposed places in Europe. This facet is the boat as a workplace and a home, the school, the safety drills, the anchorages, and the ordinary logistics of getting a crew to a beach nobody else reaches.
• What Washes Up, "Beachcleaning in Norway? Sounds like a peaceful stroll, right? Reality: hauling heavy nets, dragging plastic barrels through deep snow." Ropes grown into the ground. Fridges in the middle of nowhere. Fishing nets that take a whole crew to move. This is the work itself, across Finnmark and the northern islands, and the tonnage it adds up to: over 1,700 tons removed since 2017.
• Volunteers From Everywhere, The organisation was founded by Rolf-Ørjan Høgset in 2017 and runs on people who show up: a snowboarder from Germany, a gap-year student from London, someone who brought a cowboy hat from Arizona to clean Norwegian beaches. Skippers, coordinators, ambassadors, and the volunteers profiled one at a time as #ITSBHeroes. "There is an inspiring person behind every piece of trash that we pick up."
• Six Hundred Nautical Miles North, In spring 2025 the crew sailed from Tromsø to Svalbard, 600 nautical miles across the Arctic Ocean, scouting for a future cleanup mission. Storms, the possibility of ice and fifteen-metre waves, temperatures around −30°C, and eventually Longyearbyen, the world's northernmost town. She filmed the crossing as a series. "Before that day, I had never even seen real ice and stood there completely in awe, until our guide told us that it's rapidly disappearing."
• Four Years of a First Film, "I've been working on my first feature doc for 4 years and counting." A documentary following a surfer who joins Norway's largest beach-cleaning crew, which is to say, following herself. This facet is the unglamorous half of filmmaking: pitching, funding, editing, and the festival circuit that decides whether a film gets made at all, Sheffield Doc/Fest, IDFA, CPH:DOX. "Behind every 10-minute pitch are 10,000 hours of chaos."
• Thirty Million Tons, In May 2026 the Norwegian government approved dumping 30 million tons of toxic mining waste into the ocean, in a country she had arrived imagining as a picture-perfect postcard of clear fjords. Deep-sea mining, industrial harbours, the billion-dollar industries on the other side of the argument, and the occasional win. "If this absolutely BRILLIANT success story isn't reason enough to KEEP PUSHING."
• Some Days It Feels Heavy, "Today's one of those days where I'm just thinking: f*ck, we are so doomed." Passing 1.5°C, the fires, the wars, the paralysis of reading the news on a phone. She does not perform optimism, and she does not look away. The answer she keeps arriving at is the same one: "The only way to cut through that feeling of helplessness is to go out and actually DO something."
• Portugal, and the Places Between, Between missions: Ericeira, where the firefly finally settled a bit; cold Portuguese water and a 5/4 wetsuit; Morocco, Costa Rica, Indonesia, Copenhagen, London, and summers back east in Germany where not a lot has changed. A life lived across several countries and one element. "Somewhere between Portugal and Norway."
• What Plastic Actually Does, The explaining, which the work makes unavoidable: plastic does not disappear, it becomes microplastic; the world produces more than 400 million tonnes of it a year; what a rope does to a bird; which animals live along the coast being cleaned. "I still remember the first time I found an animal k*lled by plastic pollution. A bird's skeleton on the rocks, its beak bound shut by a piece of plastic."