“Boatbuilders”, interview with director Luke Lorentzen

Presented in the Open section, out of competition, at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival 2026, Boatbuilders is set at the head of a remote Maine harbor, where the sixty-some workers of the Brooklin Boat Yard coax wooden planks around a frame, make precise saw cuts, and sand edges for flawless joints, resulting in some of the most stunning and sought-after wooden vessels in the world. Over the course of four vibrant seasons, director Luke Lorentzen tracks the boatbuilders’ meticulous construction of a 56-foot sailboat while embedding us in the lives of these men and their close-knit community. Lorentzen talks about why he chose this story after a difficult previous film, about building the film as an ensemble rather than around a single lead, and about the attention to detail he learned from the boatbuilders themselves.

Falling back in love with the process of shooting

Lorentzen explains that Boatbuilders was, in part, a deliberate reaction to the film he had made right before it: “I had just finished a film before Boatbuilders that was incredibly meaningful to me but was emotionally very difficult. It was about end of life care in a hospital in New York City. And I knew that I loved filmmaking, but I needed to pick another topic that would be playful and delightful.” That search led him back to a place from his childhood summers: “Maine is a place that I grew up going every summer, and I always just felt really good when I was there. I decided to try and find a story that would ask me to be there for a really long period of time. So I found the Brooklin Boatyard and shot with them for about 16 months. It was just a totally life-affirming, beautiful experience, and I’m hoping the film can give the audience the same thing I was craving, and I think many of us are.”

A film about a community, not a single hero

Trent, the yard’s project manager, emerges as one of the film’s most present figures, but Lorentzen is careful to frame him as part of a larger whole: “Trent stuck out from the very first day of being in Brooklin. He’s such a tender, sweet person, and he’s also just incredible at building things. But it’s really a film about community as well, and it’s not just about one person doing something. It’s about a whole collective of people who each have their own part of the project and can only finish the boat together.” That collective structure, he says, shaped the shoot and the edit alike: “It’s different from any other film I made, in that it’s really an ensemble of many people. Throughout the shooting I needed to really get to know all of the 60 people who work at the boatyard, and in the edit figure out how all of their personalities and the energy of their work together could come through, without it feeling like the film needed a core person to follow.”

Learning to look at the world like a boatbuilder

Asked about the almost hypnotic, meditative quality of some sequences, Lorentzen says it reflects exactly what he was chasing on set: “My goal was to live the story and to be there as much as possible. The yard welcomed me into their family, and I knew that over time that would work its way into the film. I was just looking for things that were satisfying or mesmerizing, things I couldn’t look away from, but not always knowing why.” That quality of attention, he explains, came directly from the boatbuilders’ own discipline: “I was trying to get into a headspace where I wasn’t overlooking things, where small little tensions or small little details mattered. And that really came from the boatbuilders: their job is to be incredibly detail oriented, and I learned how to look at the world through that perspective.”

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