Everything to Know About Ludovica Serra's Eleven Years Filming the Fishing Council

The meeting starts at 6:10 because Settimio is always ten minutes late. The reel is already running. This has been true for eleven years, and Ludovica Serra has never once cut the wait.

**The footage.** The council of fishing-boat owners meets on the second Thursday of every month in a room above a net loft. Serra has filmed 129 meetings. Together they run 388 hours. She shot the first on a borrowed camera with a cracked eyecup, and she still has the crack on the newer ones, on purpose, she says, so the picture feels like the same eye.

**The minutes.** They are kept by hand in a green ledger by a secretary called Nello Perrotta, in blue ballpoint, without corrections. Nello writes only decisions. Serra films everything else. Year two contains a 41-minute argument about a coffee machine. Nello's entry for that evening reads: *Coffee machine. Deferred.* It was deferred for three years.

**The chair.** At the head of the table is a green vinyl chair with one short leg, propped on a folded beer mat. It has never been replaced, moved or discussed. Settimio Carbone, the chairman, sits in it. In the first reel he is 58 and has a full moustache. In the latest he is 69 and has the same moustache, in a different shape. He leans back, the short leg clicks, and everyone in the room waits for the click before they speak.

**The men.** Eleven sat at the table in the first reel. Four have retired. Three have died. Two of the empty places were filled by sons, who speak less than their fathers and check their phones under the table. Serra does not announce the departures. A man is at the table in one reel, and in the next there is a gap the width of a man. She says she never filled a gap with a title card. "People who were there already know," she told me. "People who weren't can count the chairs."

**The sound.** The room hums. It is the ice machine downstairs, and it is on every reel. In year seven the hum stops for a whole meeting, because the machine finally broke, and the men talk in a way they never had before, louder, slower, as if they had been let into a church.

**What is in it.** Diesel prices. A shared forklift. Quotas, written and spoken, in a dialect Serra says she only fully understood by year five. A birthday cake in year four that nobody cuts. A long silence in year nine that lasts 2 minutes 50 seconds and ends when Settimio says, "Right."

**What is not in it.** Boats. In 388 hours there are no shots of the sea. Serra says the sea is what the men go to when they leave the room, and she doesn't follow them.

**When you can see it.** Serra has not decided whether there is a film. She has cut one scene, the silence, and shows it to people on a laptop in her kitchen on request. She has not yet filmed the day the chair is moved, and she would rather not. The short leg still clicks, and so far someone still waits for it.