Her brother vanished at sea. But there's a bigger mystery at the heart of this doc

It's like the saying goes: those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it, and perhaps that's equally true of family lore. In Ghosts of the Sea (Les Enfants du large), which arrives at Toronto's Hot Docs Festival this Sunday after an award-winning debut at Montreal's Festival du nouveau cinéma, filmmaker Virginia Tangvald embarks on a journey around the world, collecting information about the father and brother she barely knew. And if that sounds like an ordinary use case for Ancestry.com, think again. Few of us have heard tales like these.

Peter Tangvald, the filmmaker's father, was a Norwegian adventurer. In 1966, he published Sea Gypsy, a memoir about his exploits at sea — chasing the horizon in an engine-free sailboat. In 1976, Virginia's half-brother Thomas was born on one such vessel, L'Artémis de Pytheas. And 10 years later, she herself entered the world on that same ship. 

Unlike Thomas, however, Virginia wouldn't spend her childhood on the waves. By the time she was two, she and her mother had resettled in Canada — far from the tragedy that would befall her siblings. 

In 1991, the elder Tangvald fatally crashed his sailboat in the southern Caribbean. Virginia's eight-year-old half-sister, Carmen, was killed in the wreck. Thomas, who was then just a teenager, survived. But it wasn't long before the ocean claimed him — perhaps forever. In 2014, he vanished while sailing from French Guiana and a body has never been found. 

Incredibly, Thomas's disappearance is just one of the mysteries introduced in the film. The tragedy compelled Tangvald to begin chasing the project in earnest, though on some level, she's been developing this documentary her whole life. And the story captured in the film has been further expanded into a book of the same title. Also authored by Tangvald, it was published in French last fall and has sold more than 25,000 copies in France and Quebec.

"I had this intuition there was something I had to understand," Tangvald tells us in an interview, "so I could break the cycle and break free." 

The film is Tangvald's first feature, and the production took her to multiple locations: Puerto Rico, where Thomas's wife and children still live; French Guiana; Andorra; Belgium; France; the forbidding shores of Bonaire. As she meets people who crossed paths with her father and brother — family, former colleagues, fellow sailors — the mystery only grows darker and more complex. They weren't the only ones to perish. What became of Thomas's mother? Carmen's too?

And yet, Ghosts of the Sea couldn't be more different from a true crime caper, as sensational as the details may be. If anything, the film is a mystery about the very nature of identity.

"A question that people always asked me was, 'What are you looking for?' I didn't know what I was looking for. I just had this feeling that there was something missing," says Tangvald. Though she occasionally appears on screen, her presence is mostly felt in the film's thoughtful narration — a melancholic inner monologue that captures the experience of one woman grappling with the power of stories, especially those we tell ourselves.

In her youth, Tangvald was fascinated by her dad's thirst for freedom and adventure. "I think that I grew up with this mythology of my father," says Tangvald. "I don't have any identification to a country or land or people," she says, but she had one hell of a family legend. And so, stories became her anchor.

There are a million ways to spin the same yarn, however. Why did her father and brother lose their lives to the ocean? Was it because they yearned to be wild and free? That's one way of telling it. But Tangvald needed to know if she truly had the story straight. She'd already formed so much of her identity around it.

While researching the doc, Tangvald says she felt like Telemachus in the Odyssey, a young prince who goes in search of his father, a hero of the Trojan War. In the legend, Telemachus must retrace his father's perilous journey before they can be reunited, and the documentary's visual language channels a similarly epic feel, stitching archival audio and video with contemporary footage. At times, it has a blurring effect. Are we watching Thomas play on the beach as a boy, or are those his sons in the present day? It's a poetic nod to the link between generations — as unknowable as our forebears may be.

As Tangvald collected accounts of her father's exploits, travelling to the places he'd sailed, she grew less in thrall of the myth she'd built up in her mind. There were emotional moments. Reading his old log books, she was moved by his love of nature. "I could tell that he was really transformed by the sea," she says. "But then reading his letters and talking to people, I saw that he had these moral flaws and psychological flaws."

"He saw other people as a means to his own freedom," she says, "and just the idea of freedom totally lost all of its meaning." There was no destination in sight — nowhere he wanted to be.

For Tangvald, that realization was an epiphany. "It changed my mindset," she says. Before the film, she liked the idea of living as her dad did — free of commitment and attachment. But now, she doesn't think his reality was all that exciting. "He ended up being totally a prisoner of his own rigid ideas," she says. And in seeing that, she knew the project was done. "It felt complete."

Today, Tangvald is already thinking about her next feature. She has a couple of ideas in play, including a story about a turn-of-the-century daredevil — who happens to be her granddad. But for now, the focus is Ghosts of the Sea, which opens in Quebec theatres May 9 after its run at Hot Docs.

"I don't know if it'll ever really be over," she says of the film's journey. "I just know that I feel a lot better now."