The Cove
By admin on 2014-12-29

The makers of the Oscar-winning documentary The Cove, which reveals the dark side of mass dolphin slaughters, hope the film can end the practice. Liu Wei reports

Renowned photographer Louie Psihoyos was in the Caribbean when his son wanted to have a sleepover with a kid from the neighboring boat, which turned out to be Steven Spielberg's family yacht.

When the two fathers met, Spielberg asked Psihoyos what he did for a living, and Psihoyos told him that he was making his first movie. The Jaws director's first piece of advice was, "Never work with animals or boats."

But animals and boats are mostly what Psihoyos' film, The Cove, is about.

The story won laughs when the Oscar-winning movie's co-producer Charles Hambleton shared it with reporters in Beijing last Sunday.

But many of the 300 viewers wept during the screening that followed.

The film follows a team of 11 photographers, leading divers and Hollywood prop men. The "Ocean's 11" crew revealed to the world the slaughter of thousands of dolphins in Taiji, a small town off the coast of Japan, by filming the carnage from September until the following April.

The team also found that dolphin meat, along with that of many other oceanic predators, contains levels of mercury far higher than are safe for the human body. Still, the meat was ending up in local students' lunchboxes.

The film is more like a spy thriller than a conventional documentary. The team hid cameras in woods and - with the help of world diving champions - the deep sea, concealing them inside fake rocks made by George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic company. Nearly everything the team did, it did in the dead of night with the cops hot on their tail.

Rick O'Barry, the film's main character and a former dolphin trainer of the five female dolphins from the popular TV series Flipper, disguised himself to hide his identity. He wore a black wig, surgical facemask and big sunglasses to look like an old Japanese man.

O'Barry has been arrested and banned from Taiji for his lifelong crusade of saving dolphins since one of his trained dolphins committed suicide by asphyxiating itself - that is, refusing to breath - in his arms years ago.

The film, which took three years to complete, had no script. None of its creators had made a film before.

"I think it is the fact that we are not filmmakers that makes the film look different," Hambleton says.

Because of its gripping Hitchcock style and shocking behind-the-scene revelations, the documentary had been shown at film festivals, such as Sundance and the Boston Society of Film Critics Awards. It won the best feature documentary at the 82nd Academy Awards. "The biggest award this movie has received, even before the Oscars, is to have (it) being shown in Japan, which will happen in April," he says.

"It's coming out in the cinemas. And that's the most meaningful for us."

Hambleton says it's important to understand that the film is not meant to bash Japanese.

"It's an embarrassing movie for the government - not for the people. The people of Japan want the information," he says.

Last September, Japanese press covered the story for the first time. It was a personal victory for O'Barry, who had long been campaigning to get the country's media to carry it.

The public attention has made an impact. Dolphin meat has been removed from the Taiji school lunch program. And Japan's deputy of fisheries Hideki Moronuki was fired in 2008.

Hambleton hopes the film will also be shown in cinemas in China, where shark's fin soup is part of traditional cuisine.

"When you visibly see a very large shark being thrown overboard just for its fin it's a tragic waste of life," he says.

"Certain histories change. If you look at the Aztecs ripping out the hearts of their virgins while they were are still alive, that was a tradition that was wrong. Slavery was a tradition that is wrong, too.

"There is change when people realize something is wrong."