BLACK TIDE Animation - Documentary dir. by Kim Yip Tong I France
March 31, 2025
Black Tide: Art, Memory, and the Wounds of an Oil Spill
By Koumoutsi Soultana
In the early hours of July 25, 2020, the MV Wakashio, a massive bulk carrier, ran aground on a coral reef off the coast of Mauritius. Twelve days later, its hull cracked open, releasing thousands of tons of fuel into the lagoon. What followed was not just an ecological catastrophe but a rupture in the collective psyche of an island whose identity is inextricably tied to the sea.
Kim Yip Tong’s Black Tide (Pie Dan Lo), a hand-animated short documentary, does not attempt to reconstruct the tragedy in forensic detail. Instead, it drifts through memory and metaphor, using delicate brushstrokes and layered textures to capture the psychic weight of the spill. The film, which won the Environment and Human Rights Award at the Psaroloco Children’s and Youth Film Festival, is as much about loss as it is about resilience—the intimate grief of fishermen watching their livelihoods slip away, the eerie quiet of a once-thriving lagoon now poisoned by oil, and the fleeting unity of a nation rallying to defend its shores.
Yip Tong, a Mauritian multidisciplinary artist with a background postcolonial identity research, eschews traditional documentary formats in favor of something more lyrical. Painting, for her, is a means of slowing down time, of filtering reality through emotion and memory. Animation, in turn, allows her to explore the unseen—the spiritual and metaphorical dimensions of disaster. In Black Tide, oil takes on an almost sentient quality, rendered in thick swirls of paint on glass, a substance both toxic and mesmerizing.
In conversation, Yip Tong speaks of her artistic choices with a quiet precision, weaving together reflections on ecology, history, and the enduring imprint of colonialism. The MV Wakashio spill, she suggests, is not an isolated event but part of a broader pattern of environmental exploitation—a symptom of the global hunger for resources that continues to shape the fate of small island nations. And yet, Black Tide resists easy binaries of victimhood and villainy, instead asking: How do we reconcile ourselves to a world in which we are both the destroyers and the destroyed?
Kim Yip Tong
Kim Yip Tong is a multidisciplinary artist from Mauritius. She studied textile design in Paris and London, earning a Master's in Information Experience Design from the Royal College of Art in London in 2017. Her current research focuses on natural history and postcolonial identity. Her practice includes kinetic installations, video mapping, painting, art direction, and music video production. She has created two planetarium animations, "Lucent Matter" (2016) and "Anthozoa" (2017), which have been featured in international festivals. Her work has been exhibited in various countries, and she is a professor of contemporary art at the ENSA Nantes Mauritius School of Architecture.
The MV Wakashio disaster marked an unprecedented environmental tragedy for Mauritius. In Black Tide, you combine animation with documentary to capture the human and ecological fallout of this event. How did you navigate this fusion of mediums to convey both the immediate and lasting impacts on the community?
Documentary animation is a genre I’ve been drawn towards for a while. As an artist and filmmaker I really enjoy the process of conducting interviews on topics that matter to me. I guess I’m curious the hear what people actually have to say.
In the case of Black Tide I wanted to express the indescribable feeling and trauma it is to see your world collapse in such a disaster. I wanted to talk about both the material and spiritual relationship coastal populations and islanders in general have towards the ocean. I felt like those who legitimately had to express this loss were the individuals most directly impacted : the diversity of people whose livelihood depends directly from the ocean. Since the social response to counter the Wakashio oil spill was a symbolic moment of rare national unity it was important to reach out to different communities who were bound by their ties to the ecosystem they share, and love. Fishermen and skippers from the villages and kite-surfers from the wealthy residential areas. Hence the variety of languages spoken in the film which are indicators of the characters social and economic backgrounds.
On the image side, painting is the prism through which I interpret and make sense of the world around me. A lot of the time I’m not particularly interested in capturing reality directly through the camera. Painting is a way to filter information, to pause, look, feel and lay down on paper the essence of what I experience. Animation is a medium which allows us to represent the symbolic and metaphorical aspects of reality which is why it’s so wonderful. And finally to be honest, the topic was quite sensitive at the time. animation provides a certain anonymity. The lack of a camera helps make people feel more at ease and speak more freely.
For the fusion of techniques, my projects are always mixed-media as I don’t like to limit myself. As a landscape painter, the backgrounds are hand painted in gouache and watercolour. For practical and economic reasons the characters were animated digitally and finally for both aesthetic and conceptual reasons we added oil paint on glass to represent the petrol.
Your multidisciplinary background, from textile design to natural history, informs your unique artistic voice. How did these varied influences shape the visual and narrative approach of Black Tide, and why did you choose animation as the medium to tell this particular story?
I think all my choices have always been driven by a certain curiosity and desire to learn and play with new ideas and techniques. This makes me more of a Jack of all trades rather than a specialist in any of the fields I experiment with. The narrative approach of Black Tide certainly comes from my Master degree in Information Experience Design at the RCA, where I’ve witnessed projects based on interviews and direct information collection rather than going through the process of writing a script. I guess it highlight the fact that I didn’t go to film school. As for the animation, to add onto what I developed earlier, I really enjoy painting. It’s an excuse to spend time observing what I’m interested in (coral reefs, mangroves, forests…) away from any screen or camera. If I don’t paint in the process, it just isn’t fun to me. My joy highly resides in this practice.
At its core, Black Tide is as much about the people of Mauritius as it is about the disaster itself. What role did collaboration with local communities play in shaping the authenticity of their stories, and how did their involvement impact the film’s narrative?
Spending time with the local fishermen community was a rare occasion to discover their rich and marginal lifestyle. They’re the closest we can come in Mauritius to what could be considered an indigenous population (the island had no human population before the 17th century). They’re the last hunter gatherers of modern society, the most closely and directly entrenched within the food chain. This is something I’ve been questioning for a while, when learning about the coral reef’s ecosystem and it’s interspecies interactions and codependency, the human just somehow doesn’t fit in anywhere. We’ve grown out of the natural cycle of things. Small scale artisanal fishermen, despite sometimes still having somewhat destructive techniques, remain the most closely tied to the materiality of life. Daily, their rely on the weather, tides, and behaviours of their preys, which they end up knowing intimately to survive and care for their families. They’re the first to suffer and witness any species extinction, even if they’re partly responsible of it. If you work in tourism, if the sky and the water are blue, the sun shines, you can be completely unaware of the state of the reef and the sheer existence of most species living underwater. I thus have a huge respect towards fishermen and their knowledge. They’re also to this day the most harshly and durably impacted by the oil spill. These encounters are what I love so much about documentary, confronting various visions of the world enriches my own perception of living.
As I mentioned, for Black Tide I didn’t have a script, the narration and the whole movie was developed from the interviews and my encounters with these communities. The biggest challenge defining the final storyline actually resided in finding my own voice within. Weaving together multiple singularities for a collective story.
The film resonates with both ecological urgency and postcolonial reflection. In creating Black Tide, how did you balance the personal stories of those affected with the broader, more universal themes of environmental exploitation and colonial legacies? What do you hope audiences take away from the film’s exploration of these complex issues?
I think my aim with this film was always to go beyond the micro analysis of the catastrophe. I didn’t want to portray a dualistic story of “the poor Mauritian people” against the foreign monster. I wanted to go further, asking the question of “how can something like this be allowed to happen”. What are the power dynamics, the political and historical context that enables such crime, such horror ! How can this be even possible ?! I wanted the public to zoom out, be able to place the oil spill within a global context of resource exploitation, international trade and corruption. To point out the fact that, even without the oil spill, us islander are very good at destroying our environment by ourselves. In fact we, and the whole world are already drowning in oil, we’re fossil fuel societies through all the plastic, cars, planes, electric devices and energy we consume. We couldn’t live without fossil fuels nowadays and are scouting to drill for more, including in the Indian Ocean. That somehow we’re all at our individual level, both victims and perpetrators of the ecological destruction we witness, that it’s the sum of each individual that makes the collective, hence we won’t be able to solve any of it alone, but it will require the joint effort of all actors of society. I also found it very ironic that this ecological disaster was counted using sugar cane straw. Sugar cane is the ultimate symbol of exploitation and environmental destruction in Mauritius, one trauma “saving us” from another. I found that quite ironic.
