Search the mind regarding Rotterdam, and what do you find? The biggest port in Europe, the spot market in oil, once in a while news of a spectacular drug bust. And since 1972, it is the location of the annual Rotterdam festival, haven for avant-garde, independent, and Third World films.

Rotterdam, 14 May 1940: The old town is practically wiped out by a German air attack. The fire is so fierce that even the canals are burning. Newsreel footage shows a lion calmly walking the streets, a refugee from the bombed-out zoo. Three years later, Allied bombers inflict more damage; and in 1944, already retreating, the German army mines the port and blows up more than four miles of docks and almost a quarter of the warehouse capacity. Today, the rebuilt center of Rotterdam resembles nothing more than the rebuilt center of any Western or German provincial capital: banks, pedestrian shopping streets and mournfully empty trams circling in front of the railway station. The reverberating ironies of the city's history have not escaped Edgardo Cozarinsky, author of the much acclaimed ONE MAN's WAR. He has recently been making VOLLE ZEE (High Seas), shot mainly on location in Rotterdam and Amsterdam. But despite bizarre newsreel images and the choice of a country which can certainly contribute an oblique angle to recent European history, Cozarinsky's latest film is not Rotterdam, Open City. Nor is it an “archive film” as was ONE MAN’SWAR or the “do-commentary” he has just completed for the Paris Institut National de l’Audio-Visuel (INA) as a contribution to the forthcoming centenary of Jean Cocteau's birth (JEAN COCTEAU: AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN UNKNOWN, 1983). High Seas is a fiction film, a fantasy, one man's adventure on a journey of self-discovery or possibly self-destruction.

A Swiss insurance salesman finds himself in Rotterdam with his wife. After a quarrel at the hotel, they tour the harbor. Among the container vessels, tugs and oil tankers the hero spots a three-masted schooner, rocked by the wash of the incoming tide. But what catches his eye is the figure in the rigging – a woman with flowing red hair. She becomes the mystery and the obsession for whom he gives up wife, job, and firm land. Who is she?