The Cove (Louie Psihoyos, 2010): USA

Reviewed by Charlotte Brange. Viewed at the Santa Barbara Film Festival, Lobero Theater.

Dolphins give the illusion of always being happy. Well, they’re not.

This is the much talked about documentary called The Cove, about just exactly The killing cove, located in a small village called Taiji in Japan. This city has a very dark secret. It’s the place where every year numerous dolphin’s hearts are stopped by continuous stabbing, done by local fishermen.

We get to meet Ric O’Barry, who in an early stage of the movie clearly blames himself for the dolphin slaughter. He used to be a dolphin trainer on the 1960’s hit series “Flipper”, the show made people around the world take dolphin’s to their hearts. Everybody wanted to swim with their very own ‘Flipper’, this magnificent intelligent animal called dolphin. Dolphins was wanted around the whole world and Taiji soon found themselves choosing the most ‘Flipper-like’ dolphin and shipping them around the globe. But what happened to the dolphins they captured, that didn’t match the criteria of a Flipper?

The activists, including Ric O’Barry and director Louie Psihoyos, decided to not on any case let this murdering continue. Since the Cove is restricted and forbidden area, they disguise cameras as stones, and hide them in the woods, over-looking the bay. The footage they get is more than disturbing.

We start off with the opening credits, where they used a narrator to begin telling the story. Dramatic clips of dolphins and people reminded me of a thriller, or maybe a show close to ‘CSI’. I had to stop my mind from slipping away; this is actually a true story.

By using beautiful, long shots of dolphins in slow motion, the contrast to the brutal killing is powerful. We get to see the dolphin’s ‘world’ that seem amazing – they swim around all day without no problems what so ever. Then we see the fishermen in daylight on a totally normal day, just talking nonsense to each other around a fireplace, just before their killing is about to begin. They joked and laughed with each other. Psihoyos make us rethink our rights as human being. How can we possibly be allowed to slaughter something that innocent?

Even if you don’t like dolphins, you’ll be affected. If you have any kind of a heart at all, you’ll be touched by the Cove.

Surely, it’s a one-sided story. But these people, the activists (I don’t want to call them cast or actors, the movie is too true to use feature film terms), have more than right to do so. They clearly show that they do not blame Japan or the Japanese people; they are against the whole attitude in this project. Besides the dolphin slaughter that is enough horrible, they also discover an epidemic. Dolphin meat contains a lot of mercury and is therefore highly toxic.

This movie is not like any other documentary about an animal that is under threat of extermination. Most documentaries are informative or a way to show the audience that you can make a difference. The Cove is more than that. It’s a war.

After the screening Louie Psihoyos told the audience at the Q&A that just days before the screening at the SBIFF they got a Japanese distributor for the Cove. He hoped that this will make a change; “Film is like mass destruction. It reaches out to everybody.”

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Published:
02.16.10 / 1am
Category:
Documentary, Films, Santa Barbara Film Festival 2010