"They have always come to our rescue and I feel that it is about time somebody tried to rescue them.” - Louis Psihoyos
The Cove is a brutal, yet brutally honest documentary. The eponymous cove is a tiny bay in Taiji, Japan, where 23,000 (!) dolphins are killed every year.
Every good story needs a hero, and The Cove’s is former dolphin trainer Richard O'Barry. If the name seems familiar to those over 35, it’s because in the 1960s he caught and trained the five female bottlenose dolphins that played Flipper in the American TV series. Following the suicide of a beloved dolphin, he devoted his life to ending their captivity, and the cruel industry that feeds it. He knows firsthand that confined, sterile and noisy marine parks are a slow death trap for the cetaceans, who in the wild form families, roam for massive distances, and communicate by highly sensitive sonar.
The film itself has been heralded as ‘heroic’, as is its capture of some devastatingly graphic footage. Filmmaker Louie Psihoyos, a National Geographic photographer – in his documentary feature debut – calls in what he terms his Ocean’s Eleven team of specialist daredevils, to covertly record what goes on in the cove. They include world-class free-diver Mandy Rae-Cruikshanks and her free-diving husband Kirk Krack, a special FX buddy at Industrial Light & Magic, and head of “clandestine operations” Charles Hambleton. Let’s also not forget a camera crew who all take huge personal risks during filming.
This won the documentary Audience Award at Sundance 2009, for reasons other than the fact it’s an ‘important’ film. A polished editing structure keeps up a tense, cracking pace. It intersperses majestic underwater cinematography with interviews, guerrilla-style night filming and even a few moments of light relief – mostly through O’Barry’s interactions with suspicious locals acting in a pseudo official capacity, including the overbearing “Private Space”.
The film appropriates the heist/escape genre to build momentum, so that during the scenes where the crew set up recording devices in the cove itself, the audience is left teetering on the edge of its seats. It’s nerve wracking enough to watch, until you remember that this is not a Hollywood blockbuster – this shit is actually happening! And just like a good heist film, there’s never any doubt that the audience will side with the ‘criminals’.
The Oceanic Preservation Society (of which Psihoyos is a key member) is highly critical of the International Whaling Commission (IWC), which to an extent protects whales, but not dolphins. Most of the world's performing dolphins are caught in Taiji, with those not selected harpooned to death: their toxic flesh mislabelled as ‘whale’, which despite dangerously high mercury levels, is sold in Japanese markets and palmed off to primary school lunches. Sadly, the killing for meat is merely a low value by-product of the lucrative marine park industry. And most Japanese interviewed are blissfully unaware of anything untoward.
This documentary is no eco-terrorist diatribe. The case against the killing is logically laid out: the suffering of dolphins, the toxicity of their meat, the complicity of the Japanese government in Taiji and its buying of votes on the IWC. But The Cove also raises a wider question as it closes. If humans cannot respect and preserve a species so benevolent to us, so intelligent, and so beloved: what chance do we have of saving our oceans?
As intelligent creatures (well hopefully some of us are) we owe it to another sentient, self-aware animal to watch The Cove, talk about it, and as Psihoyos said recently “Create a Tsunami of Change”.
Credits
Director: Louie Psihoyos
Producers: Paula DuPre Pesman and Fisher Stevens
Writer: Mark Monroe
The Cove opens in Auckland at the Academy Cinema on August 27th.
