A crossroad in Epstein’s still young career, End of the World was the first of several films made in the remote Ouessant archipelago. “Drawn by what I no longer know,” he later wrote, “I went to Brittany to seek the authentic elements for this film which became Finis Terrae.” Shooting with non-actors, Epstein fashions a psychologically charged drama from the kelp harvest. The central conflict is crystallized in a few brief images of a smashed wine bottle and a wounded finger left to fester. Refusing to make a simplistic opposition between documentary and fiction, Epstein renders both ethnographic facts and subjective hallucinations with the same degree of feverish intensity. The sea looms large as both a sublime physical fact and a driver of the narrative, simultaneously violent and beautiful; more than once the camera itself seems in danger of drowning. “Leaving the Ouessant archipelago,” Epstein wrote, “I felt I was taking with me not a film but a fact.”