Le Port
The programmer's note
Forty-one minutes, and the first fifteen are close to a documentary about a job most people do not know exists. Stay with it. Mbeki gets aboard the actual ships, in actual swell, and the physical risk you can see on screen is the reason the moral risk lands later. Watch the ladder climb, which is unfaked, and watch the captain's face when Fatou takes the bridge. We would greenlight the season on the bridge scene alone.
The film
Every ship over ninety metres entering Marseille takes a pilot aboard: a licensed local who climbs a rope ladder in open water and steers a stranger's vessel through the last four miles. Fatou Mbeng has done it for eleven years, on a rotation of six days on and six off, and she is one of two women on the roster. Her brother Idriss works dispatch for a haulage firm. On a Tuesday he asks her to slow one arrival by twenty minutes and explains it as a scheduling favour. A pilot knows exactly what twenty minutes is worth on a quay. The first episode spends most of its length on the mechanics of the job, the ladder, the bridge, the particular language you use with a captain who does not want advice, and then sets one small dishonest act inside all that competence. Mbeki shoots on the water in real conditions. The season this opens will be about how far a family gets to reach into a career.
