"The Free Sea" explores the Maldives as a state constituted and unbound by the cultural, political, economic, and material flows of late capitalism and anthropogenic climate change.

Considering the impacts of sea level rise on the low-lying island nation, the essay film reflects on these islands as geo-bodies of identity, sovereignty, and prosperity threatened by the breaching of coastal and climatic thresholds. The forecast dissolution of these islands represents an ontological loss of definition, and crisis of representation for objects and subjects, registering across local and global scales and systems of knowledge.

As plans are proposed for the future resettlement of a diaspora without homeland, "The Free Sea" traces consequences of this crisis, considering potential positions for new human beings subject to a complex of technological and legal systems, but afforded rights by none.