Christine Kearney, Reuters 31 Jul 09;
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A tense new film shows Japanese fishermen luring thousands of wild dolphins into a hidden secret cove in Japan where activists say they are captured for marine amusement parks or slaughtered for food.
"The Cove" follows a team of activists including former dolphin trainer from the "Flipper" television series Ric O'Barry.
They battle Japanese police and fisherman to gain access to a cove in Taiji, Japan, where barbed wire blocks people from filming dolphin killings that begin in September each year.
The documentary opens in the United States on Friday but has yet to receive distribution in Japan, where O'Barry says 23,000 dolphins and porpoises are legally killed each year.
The Japanese government said it has done nothing wrong and cites cultural differences in response to the film.
Dolphin meat is eaten by a very small percentage of Japanese people.
The film has already been praised by critics and won the audience award at this year's Sundance Film Festival. "Eco-activist documentaries don't get much more compelling than 'The Cove'," said Variety's review.
O'Barry, who has been visiting Taiji several times a year for the past eight years and now wears disguises in the town to avoid the attention of fisherman and the police, predicted the film would have a big impact.
"When the film is seen in Japan, it will shut 'the cove' down permanently," he said in a recent interview.
The 69-year-old says he began fighting against the captivity of dolphins when one of the dolphins he trained for the hit 1960s television show "Flipper" voluntarily stopped breathing until it died.
"Ric is a hero," said the film's director, Louie Psihoyos, who has photographed for National Geographic magazine. "He had success, he had fame, he had money and he turned his back on all of that to follow his conscience."
TOXIC OCEANS
The film turns into a gripping action-adventure using hi-tech cameras to film the efforts of Psihoyos and a team including underwater sound and camera experts as well as champion free divers to film inside the cove.
"The film is about leading an 'Ocean's Eleven' kind of team into this secret cove to try to reveal its dark secrets," said Psihoyos, referring to the popular Hollywood film about a top notch team who break into impossible places. "It was extremely scary."
But it largely examines environmental issues, including Japan's efforts to persuade the International Whaling Commission (IWC) to lift a ban on commercial whaling introduced in 1986. The ban does not apply to smaller cetaceans including dolphins.
It argues that toxic waste dumped into the ocean has caused higher levels of mercury poisoning found in larger species of ocean life, including dolphins.
A spokeswoman for the Japanese embassy in Washington, Izumi Yamanaka, said in an e-mail the area surrounding Taiji had traditional dietary habits of eating dolphin meat and that Japan adhered to IWC rules.
"The Japanese government believes that it is most important to recognize national and cultural differences," she said.
She added Japan complied with laws that advise pregnant women against eating seafood, including dolphin meat, with high levels of mercury, and would investigate assertions in the film that dolphin meat is sold in Japan disguised as whale meat.
Dolphin hunts are largely driven by a multibillion dollar marine amusement park industry located in the United States and around the world, who pay up to $150,000 per dolphin, according to O'Barry.
"People who see this movie are going to think twice before they buy a ticket to a dolphin show," he said.
Ultimately the film is part of a larger story of the destruction of the oceans and planet, the filmmakers said.
"'The cove' is a microcosm for the poisoning of the oceans," said Psihoyos. "A hundred years from now they are going to say this is the generation that could have turned things around."
(Editing by Sandra Maler)
'The Cove' was covert, dangerous filmmaking
Rachel Abramowitz Los Angeles Times 1 Aug 09;
How does one expose the secret systematic slaughter of 23,000 dolphins?
It helps to have a billionaire, plus a dedicated activist, a neophyte filmmaker, two of the world's best free-divers, a former avionics specialist from the Canadian Air Force, a logistics whiz trained in transporting pop-music stars around the world, a maritime technician, a military infrared camera for night cinematography, unmanned aerial drones, a blimp and fake rocks specially designed by George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic to hold secret cameras.
Also required? A willingness to risk arrest, police harassment and potentially much worse.
That was the "Ocean's Eleven"-style team assembled to make this year's Sundance sensation "The Cove," the unconventional true-life environmental thriller that brings to light the mass killings of dolphins, specifically those exterminated in the Japanese port village of Taiji, just south of Osaka. The footage in the film, which opened in L.A. theaters Friday, is shocking -- a tranquilly beautiful Japanese bay turned red with the blood of dolphins, as well as graphic images of fishermen spearing the gentle, highly intelligent sea mammals.
Unlike their larger cetacean brethren whales, dolphins are not protected by the worldwide ban on commercial whaling that has been in effect since the 1980s. Taiji, a bucolic town filled with boats bearing the images of happy dolphins, is, as shown in the film, essentially a dolphin bazaar for marine theme parks hunting for their next attraction, and they are willing to pay $150,000 per dolphin. Unselected dolphins are herded into a heavily protected secret cove where they're slaughtered for food, never mind the fact that, as the film makes clear, dolphin meat is chock-full of mercury -- or as one on-screen scientist states: The creatures are essentially swimming toxic waste dumps.
The $2.5-million film, three years in the making, was born of the friendship between National Geographic photographer Louie Psihoyos and Netscape founder Jim Clark, old dive buddies who spent the last 10 years traveling the world searching for the best reefs, which they soon realized were dramatically deteriorating each time they returned.
Psihoyos recalls being in the Galapagos Islands and watching "long-line fisherman fishing in a marine sanctuary" and seeing "bombed out reefs in Indonesia." In response to the devastation, Clark launched the nonprofit environmental group the Oceanic Preservation Society, and Psihoyos began working on what initially was going to be four TV documentaries about the endangered oceans and their species.
Psihoyos started attending mammal conferences and stumbled upon the hero of his documentary, Ric O'Barry, in 2005. The 68-year old O'Barry, an endearing and obsessed activist, was the original trainer of the five dolphins who played "Flipper" on TV and blames himself for the worldwide popularity of commercial sea parks with their live dolphin acts, a practice he now decries. "A lot of the dolphins in the third world are in people's swimming pools. It's a copycat syndrome," says O'Barry, now a marine mammal specialist for the Earth Island Institute, and leader of the Save Japan Dolphins coalition. "People go to Sea World, and say, 'Wow I can do that.' There're dolphins all over the Caribbean, and Mexico -- the whole area is like a dolphin theme park with deplorable conditions. When I see them there, I feel directly responsible. I know the TV series helped to contribute to this mess. There are $2 billion in profits that come from the captive dolphins."
Filmmaking 101
At the time, O'Barry was on his way to Taiji, where he's been going several times a year in an effort to stop the slaughter, often with journalists in tow, and he invited Psihoyos to join him. Seeing the filmic potential in the trip, Psihoyos signed on, although the acclaimed photographer first decided to take a three-day filmmaking course.
"We're all professionals, just not at this," says Psihoyos, with a laugh. "I don't know if this movie could have been made by a professional crew. A professional crew would have turned around and ran. A producer would say 'This is nuts. How long is it going to take? How much is it going to cost?' There were just too many unknowns. The risk of getting hurt or jailed was daily. It didn't take filmmakers to make this film. It took pirates."
Indeed, the film depicts two commando missions into the cove, which is surrounded by razor-wire fences and policed by vigilant fisherman, desperate to keep their business out of the spotlight. There were actually 14 cloak-and-dagger operations into the protected cove to accumulate enough footage, and a dedicated runner who every day personally and craftily spirited the film out of town. "The reality was a lot scarier than the film shows," Psihoyos says. "We got ran out of town by the police twice." These days, when O'Barry makes his still frequent pilgrimages to Taiji, he always goes in full-blown disguise.
Clark brought in another diver buddy, actor-filmmaker Fisher Stevens ("Short Circuit"), to produce and comb through the nearly 600 hours of film. Stevens in turn brought in other professionals, including editor Geoffrey Richman ("Murderball" and "Sicko") and writer Mark Monroe.
Stevens insisted that Psihoyos actually become the on-screen narrator of the story, providing a charismatic and handsome figure through which to tell the story. "He didn't want to do it at first," recalls Stevens, who eventually convinced him. "The idea was this is not a just a documentary -- it's more like a thriller."
Psihoyos says that many of his stories for National Geographic had "an activist bent," but he also had maintained the belief that "a journalist is supposed to be a fly on the wall, he's not supposed to be part of the story. Still I realized if nobody gets active, then nothing would get resolved. I felt it was time to stand up."
Psihoyos and O'Barry hope the film will generate awareness and help bring change to the situation in Taiji. As a country, Japan has also opposed extending the international whaling ban to dolphins. Speaking before the film's commercial release, O'Barry noted, "[The Japanese] don't know this tsunami of bad publicity is coming their way. In Japan, they call it 'giatsu,' which translates into external pressure. . . .[This] movie is giatsu on a massive scale."
From Flipper’s Trainer to Dolphin Defender
Jeannette Catsoulis, The New York Times 31 Jul 09;
When the director Louie Psihoyos slipped into the little coastal town of Taiji, Japan, it was under cover of documenting the degradation of ocean reefs. Once there, however, he proceeded to mount one of the most audacious and perilous operations in the history of the conservation movement.
“The Cove” is much more than just a record of that adventure. Like the director’s cover story, the movie is a Trojan horse: an exceptionally well-made documentary that unfolds like a spy thriller, complete with bugged hotel rooms, clandestine derring-do and mysterious men in gray flannel suits. Those men — perhaps cops, perhaps worse — tail Mr. Psihoyos and his crew unrelentingly, determined to prevent anyone from filming the enormously lucrative dolphin capture and slaughter that support the town’s economy and employ its fishermen.
This killing may be legal — dolphins and other small marine mammals are not protected by the ban on commercial whaling — but, as we shall see, the methods used are so nonchalantly brutal and gut-churningly primitive that Taiji officials are understandably publicity-shy. (And, we learn later, there are other secrets lurking beneath the town’s thriving tourist industry and cute, dolphin-shape pleasure boats.) Consequently, anyone straying too close to the kill zone — a secluded lagoon protected by steep cliffs, manned tunnels and razor-wire gates — is violently harassed by videocam-wielding fishermen hoping to record an imprisonable offense.
None of which fazes Mr. Psihoyos, an urbane eco-warrior who pops up periodically to provide context and clarification. His soothing tones, however, can’t disguise a relish for the fray: beneath the silver-fox exterior beats a rabble-rousing heart. (“You try to do the story legally,” he insists, eyes twinkling in remembrance of every cloak-and-dagger move.) That heart invigorates every frame of “The Cove,” as does Mr. Psihoyos’s eye for a powerful image (his photographs have graced many an issue of National Geographic) and savvy narrative style: this is no angry enviro-rant but a living, breathing movie whose horrifying disclosures feel fully earned.
Seduced by the familiar rhythms of the heist thriller, we watch as Mr. Psihoyos recruits his dream team — including a former avionics engineer with the Canadian Air Force and a pair of champion free divers — and turns it loose. Planting ingeniously camouflaged, state-of-the-art equipment in and around their target, they capture sights and sounds of uncommon beauty and quiet revelation: a group of fishermen reminiscing about blue-whale pods as dense as “a clump of bamboo” and a ghostly, thermal handprint clinging to a gatepost like arcane spoor. Viewed from below, the hypnotically graceful progress of a free diver resembles nothing so much as an undulating mermaid with a giant can opener for a tail — an inadvertent clue to the movie’s intentions.
Adroitly assembled by the award-winning editor Geoffrey Richman, the movie’s many interviews and interests (ranging from dolphin-human relations to the mystery of where all that slaughtered meat ends up) interweave seamlessly. And if the film’s villains are sometimes difficult to untangle, it could be because one of them, the worldwide marine-park industry, is not formally represented; it could also be because without our patronage, that industry would not exist.
Heroes, however, are instantly identifiable, like the shy Japanese councilmen who risk their jobs to protect schoolchildren from mercury-tainted dolphin meat. But “The Cove,” like the dolphins, would be lost without Richard O’Barry, who captured and trained all five of the animals who made Flipper a television star and a household name and sparked the craze for performing sea mammals. His drooping eyes and sagging shoulders testify to the bone-deep exhaustion of someone who has spent the last 35 years atoning, and when he gate-crashes a meeting of the International Whaling Commission, the video screen strapped to his chest is like a physical manifestation of decades of guilt.
“If a dolphin is in trouble anywhere in the world, my phone rings,” he says. (We don’t need to be told that his heart breaks.) You may not give a fig for dolphins, but Mr. O’Barry is giving enough for us all.
“The Cove” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Blood in the water and tears in the eyes.
THE COVE
Opens on Friday in Manhattan.
Directed by Louie Psihoyos; written by Mark Monroe; edited by Geoffrey Richman; music by J. Ralph; produced by Fisher Stevens and Paula DuPré Pesmen; released by Roadside Attractions. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
The Cove movie website
The Cove trailer on YouTube
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