A boat has many powers: to gather a society in its making, to distribute goods, to carry people and ideas across places that, it seems to us, are more different than ever before. The widely traveled film From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf (2009–2013), a vast, undulating, and musical spatio-temporal journey through the Western Indian Ocean, is a result of four years of dialog, friendship, and exchange between CAMP and a group of sailors from the Gulf of Kutch, who make and sail boats. They also make videos, sometimes with songs married to them. We follow their physical crossing through the gulfs of Persia and Aden, often going “where no one else wants to go”—their giant wooden boats embodying a vital order of “world-trade,” the kind that cuts perpendicularly to the phenomena of both piracy and sanctions. Structured as one season-at-sea, and made from material shot by many people, over many years, and in many formats, the film shows us a “view from the other boat,” non-imperial and made by skilled sailors and people-to-people relations, in some ways, also the other of the “distressed sea.”

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