The new film On The Sea, directed by Helen Walsh, unspools in a remote coastal community where hidden desire collides with long-standing ties. At its core is Jack, a mussel raker whose stable marriage unravels when he becomes entangled with Daniel, a magnetic newcomer. Walsh frames this upheaval against windswept beaches and tight social networks, using setting as a character to examine masculinity, identity and the cost of concealment.
Walsh spoke to DIVA ahead of the film’s screening at BFI Flare, reflecting on why this particular story kept returning to her over a decade and how personal memory and community shape cinematic choices. The conversation moves between intimate influences and broader concerns about representation, offering a view of filmmaking that is both personal and civic-minded.
The personal origins of a film
Walsh explains that On The Sea began as a persistent idea rather than a single lightning-bolt moment. The protagonist, Jack Morgan, lives a life familiar to Walsh: raised in a small Northern town during the Thatcher years, feeling hyper-visible as one of the few people of colour in a white neighbourhood. Those formative experiences — the stares, the violence, the attempts to blend in — informed Walsh’s empathy for Jack and his choices. In her words, the marriage makes sense as a move to survive in a place that offers little room for difference.
Real-life threads
The narrative also draws on a real-life encounter Walsh remembers: a father in a tight-knit town who was publicly outed mid-life and driven away by ostracism. That pattern of forced exile and fractured belonging appears in the film as a quiet, painful ripple that reshapes relationships and futures. Walsh uses these elements not as sensationalist drama but as the emotional logic of a community facing a breach of its norms.
Effects, influences and cinematic lineage
Walsh situates her work inside a lineage of queer texts that first reached her through books. As a teenager she devoured writers like James Baldwin and Jeanette Winterson, finding in literature a freedom that censored contemporary cinema did not always permit. On film, she cites My Beautiful Laundrette as a turning point, noting how the film’s blend of race, class and sexuality in Thatcher-era Britain opened up new imaginative possibilities for representation.
Why festivals matter
For Walsh, festivals such as BFI Flare are crucial cultural infrastructure. She argues that while streaming platforms have expanded access to hidden and historic queer voices, festivals create an irreplaceable communal space where filmmakers and audiences meet, debate and mourn together. In an age of fragmentation, Walsh believes festivals spark the conversations that transform an isolated viewing into a collective exchange.
Audience, resonance and responsibility
Screening at the 40th BFI Flare: London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival — which runs 18 – 29 March at BFI Southbank and where On The Sea premieres on 23 March — brings both pride and nerves for Walsh. She knows members of the audience may have lived Jack’s experience: marriages kept for safety, sudden exposure, the social exile that follows. Her hope is that the film offers recognition and, where possible, consolation; that viewers who felt alone will find echoes of their lives rendered with care.
Walsh also insists that LGBTQIA+ filmmaking remains vital in contemporary cultural life. She warns that shifts in politics and public discourse sometimes move in troubling directions, making stories that respond to, resist or reflect those currents more important than ever. For mainstream viewers, she points out, queer cinema often provides a fresher, more layered approach to character and form—one that resists simple narratives and embraces intersectional complexity.
Imagined company
Asked whose presence she would welcome beside her at a screening, Walsh names the multimedia artist and activist David Wojnarowicz and director Catherine Corsini. The pairing, she suggests, represents both fierce political witness and a tender, human exploration of desire—qualities she aspires to in her own work.
In combining a personal origin story with a clear advocacy for communal platforms, Helen Walsh’s On The Sea positions itself as a film that seeks to connect rather than merely depict. It looks to history and literature for its roots, and to festivals like BFI Flare for oxygen: spaces where difficult conversations can begin and where marginalised stories are given the room to breathe.