Film
Witness the Wild Festival: The Cove
- Director
- Louie Psihoyos
- Certificate
- 12A
- Running Time
- 91 mins
Rum place, Taiji. This Japanese town is filled with cutesy murals and statues of dolphins and whales. Boy, these people must love their cetaceans. Except that every year 23,000 dolphins are driven into an isolated cove and hacked, slashed and beaten to death until the sea is stained deep crimson with their blood. Foreign tourists wishing to view this quaint tradition are actively discouraged. The whole area is fenced off, and the moment anyone produces a camera hordes of aggressive fishermen appear bearing placards reading (in English) Don’t Take Photos. At town’s dolphinarium, you can even eat the cast while enjoying the show.
One of the worst trends in modern documentary film-making is the authored film in which we have to endure hours of crap that should have remained on the cutting room floor as the presenter drones on about his or her personal journey and/or the difficulties of getting the film made. Just this once, it’s an entirely appropriate approach, as this Best Documentary Oscar winner from 2009 is concerned with animal rights activists’ efforts to capture incontrovertible evidence of the barbarism of the annual slaughter, which is, of course, denied by the Japanese government. Director Louie Psihoyos recruits an army of collaborators, ranging from the world’s leading free divers to boffins at Steven Spielberg’s ILM, mounting a gripping guerrilla mission to ring the cove with a battery of concealed high definition cameras and sound-recording devices, both above and below the water. The footage the team obtains is every bit as sickening as you might anticipate, though the squeamish may wish to know that we only get to see it at the end.
The Cove is an angry, wholly partisan documentary, and all the better for it. But Psihoyos isn’t simply concerned with the espionage, packing in a vast amount of information on such topics as over-fishing, mercury poisoning and how Japan buys International Whaling Commission votes from bankrupt Caribbean islands. The film’s hero is poacher-turned-gamekeeper Ric O’Barry. Once the world’s leading dolphin trainer, he now campaigns for the release of all these intelligent, sensitive beasts from captivity. Lest we feel culturally superior here, one of the revelations is that the carnage is effectively subsidised by the multi-million pound international aquarium industry. In addition to putting pressure on the Japanese, audiences should ask awkward questions about how wild animals wind up in their local zoos, wildlife parks and aquariums.
This screening is part of Wildscreen’s Witness the Wild festival. Go here to reserve your free ticket.
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