Thirty-six hours at a container terminal, from the last ship of Tuesday to the first of Thursday

A container terminal does not stop, and its rhythm is set by ships that arrive on a schedule nobody on the ground controls. We filmed thirty-six hours at one terminal, across three shifts.

The film opens in the crane cab. A ship-to-shore crane operator sits 40 metres up, looking straight down through a glass floor, and completes a cycle — lift, traverse, place, return — about every ninety seconds for an eight-hour shift.

The planners

The least visible work is in the yard planning office, where a small team decides where every container goes when it lands. A container placed wrong is not lost; it is buried, and digging it out costs three or four moves that earn nothing.

The planners work against a discharge sequence they receive hours before the ship arrives, and which changes.

Every box we put down is a promise about when someone will want it back. Get that wrong four hundred times and the terminal stops moving.— A yard planner, at 05:50

The gate

The final section follows drivers at the gate, where average turn time at this terminal is 41 minutes. Drivers explain what most coverage of port congestion misses: they are paid by the trip, not the hour, so waiting is not an inconvenience but a direct loss of income.

• Runtime: 11 minutes 22 seconds
• Filming: continuous across three shifts at one terminal
• Crane cycle: about 90 seconds, sustained for an eight-hour shift
• Gate turn time: 41 minutes on average at this terminal

The terminal in the film handles roughly 4,000 container moves a day. Nobody in it uses the word logistics.