On Dec. 11 at 6pm, the Great Lakes Maritime Heritage Center will host movies night at the museum. The featured film will take viewers beneath the surface of the Great Lakes with this film featuring cutting-edge, never-seen-before, underwater footage.

Filmmakers Yvonne Drebert and Zach Melnick go on a journey into the life cycle of whitefish in the Great Lakes and the impact of invasive quagga mussel.

We originally showed this film during the 2025 Thunder Bay International Film Festival and we are hosting an encore presentation due to popularity and demand. Join us on Thursday, December 11th in the theater of the Great Lakes Maritime Heritage Center at 500 W. Fletcher Street in downtown Alpena. This is a free event and open to all. The film will begin at 6pm.

All Too Clear is a documentary series and feature that uses cutting-edge underwater drones to explore how quadrillions of tiny invasive mussels are re-engineering the ecosystem of North America’s Great Lakes at a scale not seen since the glaciers. The mussels are trapping nutrients, the building blocks of life, on the lake bottom. Without nutrients, organisms of all kinds – from the tiniest plankton to the largest fish – are vanishing, creating vast biological deserts.

While the consequences for nature and people are severe, the loss of life has had an extraordinary side effect: it’s made the lakes clearer than ever before. All Too Clear harnesses this clarity to tell the story of life in the world’s largest freshwater lake system. From dazzling shallow water worlds that look more like the Caribbean than the Great Lakes, to previously undiscovered shipwrecks, completely entombed in mussels, 300 feet beneath the surface – All Too Clear brings freshwater species and ecosystems into the spotlight usually reserved for ocean environments.