SEVERAL IMPORTANT DOCUMENTARIES about the marine environment have been released in recent years, including Rob Stewart's Sharkwater (2007) and, most recently, Rupert Murray's treatment of Charles Clover's book The End of the Line.
Louie Psihoyos joins these campaigning film-makers with the release this month of The Cove, a hard-hitting examination of our relationship with dolphins. It's a thought-provoking and very moving film that asks difficult questions.
Talking by telephone from his home in Colorado, Louie Psihoyos told me that The Cove was "the perfect date movie", because "women generally want to go and watch a film that they find moving, and men want something with some action in it".
It's difficult not to agree, and Psihoyos succeeds in delivering these seemingly incompatible results.
The Cove follows the director and a small film crew as they try to get footage of the gruesome slaughter of dolphins that takes place annually in the Japanese fishing village of Taiji.
Accompanied by Ric O'Barry, the man who originally trained the dolphins for the Flipper TV series in the 1960s, the crew brave Japanese police, members of the fishing mafia and hostile town councillors as they try to document the killing of hundreds of dolphins in a secret cove that is blocked off from public view.
The drama of this film comes from the night footage as the crew attempt to smuggle hidden cameras into the cove, assisted by champion freedivers Kirk Krack and Mandy Rae Cruikshank.
Watched at every turn, they are physically threatened and O'Barry, in particular, is harassed by the police repeatedly.
O'Barry is a poignant figure. There is archive footage of him with "Flipper" (a bottlenosed dolphin called Kathy) and other captive dolphins. O'Barry acknowledges the guilt he feels for inspiring a generation of people around the world to believe that they too could have a relationship with a dolphin.
"I was as ignorant as I could be for as long as I could be," he says at one stage. For these intelligent mammals, being held in small training pools and lagoons is, he believes,
deeply inhumane.
The film contends that the Taiji slaughter is part of a wider problem: the captured dolphins are first selected for use in aquatic theme parks and dolphinariums in the Far East.
After the trainers have picked out the dolphins they want (usually the unscarred, healthy young females), the rest of the pod is herded into the secluded bay and stabbed to death; one after another.
The most harrowing scenes of the slaughter occur only towards the end of the film, but viewers watch and listen as the film crew listen to underwater recordings of the dolphins "screaming" with their clicks and whistles in unison as they try to escape the fishermen.
PSIHOYOS IS ADAMANT that he did not set out to make an "anti-Japanese" film.
"Most Japanese people have no idea about what is happening in Taiji," he explains. "When we show them the footage, they are shocked. But there are vested interests in Japan that want to keep this a dirty secret."
Unsurprisingly, permission to screen the film at this year's Tokyo Film Festival was withdrawn.
The Cove is not just a film about smiley, lovable dolphins. It also delves into the murky, corrupt world of the International Whaling Commission.
And it reveals shocking information about what happens to the meat from the slaughtered dolphins. Sold to supermarkets, sometimes mis-labelled as "whale meat", it contains seriously high levels of organic pollutants, including mercury and cadmium, known to be dangerous to humans.
Psihoyos is also realistic about the cultural sensitivity of preaching to another country about whether or not they should eat dolphins. "Is it arguably any worse to kill and eat an intelligent animal like a pig?" he asks.
The Cove has been granted a PG13 certificate, though I'm not sure all children of that age could cope with it. It's not filled with gratuitously horrific scenes of killing, but the issues raised by the film are complex.
After watching it, I felt a mixture of emotions. Sadness. Anger. Frustration. Doubt. Do dolphins deserve special protection? Should intelligent mammals be used for our entertainment? Why is it so hard to get public attention focused on marine conservation problems in general?
The Cove doesn't provide glib answers. But it will make you question all sorts of things about our relationship with the seas. Watch it.
Vertigo Films
www.thecovemovie.com
UK cinema release: from 23 Oct
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