Product details
Product name: The Cove
Reviewer: Kate Arneman
Publisher: Madman Entertainment
G Rating:
"We have a mission statement: 'We're not trying to save the whole planet, just 70 per cent of it," laughs Louie Psihoyos, co-founder of the Oceanic Preservation Society and director of award-winning documentary The Cove.
"The way the movie is set up is that The Cove isn't just about the cove. It's a microcosm for what's going on in the oceans," he says.
The film's central point is a secret cove in the middle of a National Park in Taiji, Japan. The cove is a natural fortress, protected on three sides by steep cliffs, with an entrance on one side protected by high spiked gates with barbed wire and tunnel entrances protected by guards and dogs.
Taiji is where dolphins are captured each year to supply ocean theme parks and swim with the dolphin programs with their star attractions - a highly lucrative industry that Psihoyos estimates is worth US $2 billion a year.
The secret cove is where those animals passed over, including mothers and calves, are slaughtered en masse by local fishermen. Although it contains toxic levels of mercury, the meat is sold for human consumption, often falsely labelled as whale meat to attract a higher price.
Human activities such as burning coal contribute to mercury levels in our oceans and dolphin meat has such dangerously high levels because they are large marine mammals high up in the food chain.
Psihoyos heard about Taiji when he met Richard O'Barry, the world's foremost dolphin activist (who in the film quips, "If there's a dolphin in trouble around the world, my phone rings.")
O'Barry trained the bottlenose dolphins for 1960s TV show Flipper, but became convinced that keeping these remarkably intelligent animals in captivity for human entertainment was unethical and cruel.
Thrills and spills
The Cove is not your typical doco with a green message. This is intelligent film-making as an extreme sport - presented as an exhilirating thriller.
After attempts to enlist the help of local authorities and gain entrance to the cove legally were met with hostility, Psihoyos and O'Barry came up with a highly risky alternative - an undercover mission to get close enough to film the killing of the dolphins and expose the practice to the world.
To boldly go where no film crew had gone before called for an unconventional team, tactics and equipment. An ex-military electronics expert developed cameras that ran on batteries used by climbers on Mt Everest; artificial rocks created by movie set-makers to house the cameras were placed within the restricted area in the middle of the night; two freedivers (including world champion Mandy-Rae Cruickshank who can hold her breath for about six and half minutes, the same as a dolphin's standard dive) placed audiovisual equipment underwater.
Throughout filming, the team were under surveillance by local police and after confronting an official of the national Fisheries Agency with illegally obtained footage of the inhumane methods used to kill the dolphins, it was time to hightail it out of the country.
"We got out of the country as soon as we could," recalls Psihoyos. "We had a car waiting for us, we were packed up."
Snapper to activist
What drove Psihoyos, world-renowned National Geographic photographer, to tackle such a demanding topic and take such risks in the making of this, his first film?
"I always wanted to be a Jacques Cousteau even though I was brought up in a land-locked state," admits Psihoyos, who was born in Iowa. "It was just a fantasy but I've been diving since 1976."
As a keen scuba diver he had seen the decline of the world's oceans firsthand, witnessing illegal long-line fishing in the Galàpagos Islands, dynamiting in Indonesia and the devastating consequences of rising sea temperatures and acidification on reefs and marine life.
He remembers returning to a dive spot in the Virgin Island after 20 years and teaching the young daughter of a friend to snorkel.
"I was amazed that there was nothing left there; it was just dead. And there was this one little fish going by and she was screaming through the snorkel and I thought, 'My God, the child thinks that this is beautiful.'"
"Every generation is adapting to this diminishment. It's terrifying."
Making a splash
The Cove has been well-received at film festivals around the world, winning the World Documentary Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival and Best Documentary at the Sydney Film Festival, among others.
But perhaps most gratifying for Psihoyos has been the response of the Taiji authorities, who have removed dolphin meat from the school lunch program and the former deputy director of the Fisheries Agency Japan from his post since the film was shot.
And as the documentary screens in Australia and beyond, Psihoyos hopes the reponse will continue to ripple out - that audiences will be moved to boycott dolphin amusement parks and swim with dolphin programs and also become aware of the human impact on the health of the oceans.
"We feel like we can concentrate on this one thing and then slowly expose people to the bigger issues," he says. "First of all get them emotionally involved in the issue, then get them to realise how we're all connected."
The Cove trailer
