O.K. Rick 2015 45mins

The two female protagonists of O.K. Rick are Rick Blaine and Victor Laszlo, named after the male anti-hero and resistance fighter from Casablanca, 1942. Their Ilsa Lund, the third element of the triangle, is the fictional island Mainland-5. Laszlo has travelled there to help conduct the national census of the population, with Blaine, a local islander, as her reluctant and world-weary assistant.

Laszlo, we find out, is a poet as well as data collector. Throughout the film, she borrows from the words of Charles Olson's poetry volume Maximus. One voiceover accompanies a panning shot over the dunes and sea of Mainland-5:

...o my people, where shall you find it, how, where, where shall you listen / when all is become billboards, when, all, even silence, is spray- gunned?.... ....when even you, when sound itself is neoned in?

The film casts land as a commodity, in both present day and historic terms. As the two officials absurdly measure the shoreline, O.K. Rick also features shots of broken, barnacled oil pipes running along the coast or littering a field, as if oil production could be a thing of the past in this futuristic setting. O.K. Rick also interweaves scenes from a court room setting, where a man recounts aspects of Udal law, which was established in Norse times, and is still upheld by Orkney and Shetland. It defines ownership of the shoreline as one which extends to the lowest spring ebb, rather than the distinction of the high water mark, as recognised throughout the rest of the UK.