The Cove - Louie Psihoyos
This film is more about its making than the event it is documenting. This in itself is very interesting.
The narrative that they construct about the making of the film isn’t great.
There is no huge crisis moment. They try to make this the moment that the request to film on location is denied. We know it is going to be denied, so this is not a big moment at all.
The film crew, led by Louie, is attempting to document the annual dolphin hunt in Taiji, Japan. We are introduced to the state of play by Richard Barry (Absence of Malice and Flipper).
Where to begin. Every year in Taiji, dolphins are herded into a series of coves to be sold as performing dolphins.
The majority are not chosen. They are herded into a well-protected cove, out of sight of everyone. It is here that they are killed.
The film looks at the background of all of this. Barry was responsible for capturing the dolphins that were used in Flipper. We are presented with information, at length, about how bad captivity is for these social animals.
Barry is so remorseful about helping kick off the industry. He tells us some very harrowing stories.
For example, one of the Flipper dolphins swam into his arms and chose to stop breathing. This was a key moment in Barry’s activism, and he immediately tried to free other dolphins from marine parks.
The sale of dolphins for parks is where the real money is. The rest of the dolphins are killed, and their meat is sold. But dolphin meat is really bad because it has high mercury levels.
Japan knows all of this. It has been through all of this before with another town that used to participate in the trade as well.
There were widespread birth defects. So why would they allow this to happen again?
The movie posits that Japan may actually be very worried about food security.
This is where another part of the film comes in. The International Whaling Commission (IWC).
We get to see some truly farcical scenes as Japan makes its argument for scientific research by killing whales. This doesn’t really hold water for me, as the dolphins are poisonous, and they know.
The IWC does show some crazy stuff that Japan is prepared to do to be able to keep on whaling. Like bribing other governments to vote for it to continue.
The tail end of the film is the most interesting. They have a ‘putting the crew together’ section.
We have maps of the hidden cove and where they plan to station the hidden cameras.
We get to see a dry run to test the underwater equipment. The night vision stuff is excellent and exciting. They don’t let us know if they are successful or not until we see the full footage.
The film is good overall. We get some great background into a hidden industry that we should know is pretty bad now.
The bits that I find hard to understand are why? What does Japan get out of the hunt apart from the performing dolphins being sold?
They did get some interesting vox-pops from Japanese people in other cities about the topic in general, which was interesting but hardly representative. Just sad really.
