Walk through the double doors at the Brown-RISD Hillel any day this past semester and you would have found the shell of a submarine, sprawling beached-whale style across the chapel floor. An homage to neither Jonah’s whale nor Noah’s arc, the 30-foot-long wooden structure is rather the set of Four Hundred Fathoms Deep, a 15-minute film written and directed by Joëlle Dong ’21 that wrapped up production in late May. Though the movie’s plot is set in Maine, the Shakespearean tale of two-star crossed lovers is almost entirely filmed inside the roughly 4,000 cubic feet of the sub, designed by Oliver Fisher ’22 and constructed over the past year and a half with the help of RISD student Sarah Harrison.

“Though institutional, the submarine was cozy,” says Dong, reciting the film’s opening line from memory. “A lot of times when I’m writing things will start with a hook, and that line just got stuck in my head.” The phrase first came to Dong, a comparative literature concentrator, during a fiction workshop freshman year when the Bay Area native became fascinated by the deep sea. “It’s so funny because if you grow up by the ocean, it becomes so familiar,” she explains. “But in reality, you only know the surface of it.”