The English translation of the title of this extraordinary film captures only one aspect of the ambiguous, original Spanish phrase.
There was a TV movie made about Ramón Sampedro's life in 2001 (who died in 1998) and to some extent the Alejandro Amenábar has built his story around the skeleton of a based on a true story TV format, bringing to the subject some of the preocupations we saw in Abre los Ojos and The Others, and using it to address some very interesting questions about the value of human existence.
The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw wrote The Sea Inside off as an "unchallenging issue movie". However, an issue movie is exactly what this isn't.
Ramón Sampedro was himself very clear about the fact that he spoke as a person and not as an issue. He had to fight hard against those motivated by the belief he had the power to become "contagious" through the set of ideas and issues his private cause represented in society.
Rather than being a film about suffering and disability, Mar Adentro is one about human limitations in a much wider sense. Our freedom is never absolute, but for most the limits, personal and circumstantial, are hard to define without us an obvious frame of reference like Sampedro. He inspired love and gave meaning to the lives of his household while at the same time he sensed that he was depriving them of a piece of their own potential for liberty.
Is a human life one's own private property, as Sampedro believed, or does it belong communally to the circle of one's friends and family? Is it death we fear most, or is it grief?
Amenábar clearly wants us to share the mixed emotions of those who were charmed by this ship's mechanic paralysed from the neck down at the age of 26. It's important that at the end that we sympathise with his fight for death, and yet also sense that we will miss him when he's gone.
Sampedro assessed his situation and chose death. Like the great stoic thinkers of Antiquity, he anticipated a restoration of the kind of non-sentience that preceeds birth and considered that this was unlikely to feel bad beyond the moment of extinction. It is this coldly rational view of the bleakness of one life that gives this film its universal impact.
There are great lines ("You learn to cry by smiling") and great sequences, such as the debate between Sampedro and the quadraplegic priest Padre Francisco:
Padre Francisco: "Freedom without a life is not freedom."
Ramón Sampedro: "A life without freedom is not a life."
Even setting aside the subject matter, Mar Adentro is a marvellous piece of film-making and cinematic story telling. Amenábar's technique is faultless from start to finish. His cast, not just the Oscar-nominated Bardem, are all superb. The film also serves as a paean to rain-drenched Galicia.
Meanwhile, over on the Beeb I caught a single episode last week of Beyond Boundaries, a mosquito-on-the-nose documentary about a group of differently-able Brits attempting to cross from Atlantic to Pacific at the point their ancestors would have built the canal, Nicaragua.
This lamentable programme demonstrates that wheelchairs have the potential to be as unwelcome a presence in the rainforest as pushchairs in supermarkets (or anywhere really).
It is founded on the unstated, yet overtly cynical observation that people with disabilities can be amongst the most spoiled and self-centered members of our society. The resulting spectacle is as uplifting an insight into the human spirit as Big Brother.
Resentment was focussing on Charlie; deaf, black and gay, but able-bodied enough to appreciate the essential futility of the whole exercise. Who knows what the economically-cripped forest dwellers of the Mosquito Coast make of all this. If anyone is benefitting, it certainly isn't them.
