10 Movies to See Before You Die

“A dolphin smiling is nature’s greatest deception.”

When Ric O’Barry took the job training dolphins on the show Flipper, he had no idea what he was getting into. Living with the dolphins 7 days a week he learned an incredible amount about these beautiful creatures and, unwittingly, created the world’s appetite for watching them do stupid tricks at theme parks. After a particularly traumatic, but telling, incident with the dolphin he was closest to that resulted in the end of her life, he realized that captivity is too detrimental to the lives of dolphins and dedicated his life to returning them to the ocean. Arrested countless times and living very much on his passion, O’Barry strives to create awareness about dolphin issues. Which brings us to The Cove.

The Cove is an inlet in the small fishing town of Taiji, Japan, along a major dolphin migration route where dolphins are captured, chosen and taken away to theme parks such as SeaWorld. The rest of the captured dolphins are brutally murdered under the guise of both food and “pest control”. In all, every year 23,000 dolphins are slaughtered. The Japanese government denies that neither this cull nor the resulting mercury ridden meat that makes its way into general Japanese food sources ever happens. The Cove is a brilliant, heartbreaking and important film about how Ric O’Barry and an “Ocean’s 11″ style team journey to get the footage to prove this is happening, to expose it and, hopefully, stop it.

As I’m sure you can tell from my description above, this movie is not easy to watch. Everything in it from Ric O’Barry’s tearful description of some of his horrifying experiences to the actual footage they retrieve is uncomfortable, but necessary. The filmmaker, Louie Psihoyos, seems to understand this, focusing on what an incredible group of people he is shooting and peppering the story with wonderful humor, even in the face of horrible circumstances. The result is a brilliantly put together, extremely watchable film about some very horrible animal treatment that you should get very, very upset about.

The movie focuses on a number of major political issues surrounding whaling practices and the treatment of a group of sea animals we still know little about. Being too small to fall under the international whaling laws, dolphins are not protected. The film focuses on Japan’s many efforts to have the whaling laws repealed and to ensure that dolphins do not come under these laws. They pay very underprivileged nations to vote with them at the International Whaling Commission (IWC). They go to great lengths to get incorrectly packaged dolphin meat into the general population. They conduct an incredible amount of ‘experiments’ using whales, which then have the side effect of being able to use the meat for food, so as to not waste the animal. This information is presented in such a way so as to allow you to choose your own feelings about it and to decide what you might want to do. Don’t be fooled, it’s extremely infuriating.

In addition to the reasonably shocking information about the way Japan conducts itself with respect to whaling and the IWC, the film also makes a very good case for the fact that dolphins are not only very intelligent beings, but that they are also sentient, being able to pick themselves out of a crowd of other dolphins, communicate fully with humans, are capable of feelings and are more than able to understand that they being murdered. Basically, they’re making the argument that the murder of 23,000 dolphins per year is exactly the same as slaughtering 23,000 humans.

While I was watching this film I went through a very wide range of emotions. Many of them were elicited directly by the film itself – horror, sadness, outrage, joy, awe – but many of them came from my own understanding of social activism. Many times while watching I felt a little as though the filmmakers were leading the audience down the garden path. This documentary could just as easily have been made about cows, chickens or, really, any part of the food industry that uses animals. During the Q&A after the movie it was discussed the message of the movie shouldn’t be ‘Save the Dolphins’ as much as it should be, you are a fully functioning sentient being and you are capable of getting up every morning and making decisions about what you are going to do. It might mean that you choose to buy products from responsible companies or choose food sources that are from humane sources, it might mean that you buy a different kind of lightbulb or that you become a vegetarian. Bottom line, choose your own cause and do something about it, they don’t demand that you go out and join theirs. And that’s a message I can get behind. What they have done, however, is provided a very compelling argument to choose this one and, trust me, it’s compelling.

The filmmakers here didn’t want to just capture footage that exposed the slaughter of 23,000 dolphins, they wanted to capture footage that would make people change. I didn’t watch the footage that they went to such lengths to get. I realize that this defeats the purpose of the film, but as I stared down at my notebook to avoid looking at what I knew I couldn’t handle, I could see the blood red screen in the very top of my vision and I could hear the horror in the theatre. I didn’t look, but it’s okay. I sill got the message. I still cared. I’m still angry.

I think that this documentary is brilliant and I think that everyone should see it, even though I fully accept that not everyone can. When it comes out in wide release in the fall please make an effort to get to a theatre to support it, even if you stare down at your popcorn for the last 20 minutes. This movie is excellent and most certainly important. It makes its arguments gently rather than brutally, because it doesn’t have to. The footage and the acts they trying to expose are brutal enough.

To get involved go to the movie’s website at http://thecovemovie.com/.