イルカ殺す場面収録した映画、米で論議
【ロサンゼルス＝飯田達人】日本の伝統的なイルカ漁で、漁師が多数のイルカを仕留めるシーンを収録した米ドキュメンタリー映画「入り江」（原題Ｔｈｅ Ｃｏｖｅ）がロサンゼルスとニューヨークで公開され、「むごい秘密が暴かれた」（米有力紙）などと論議を呼んでいる。
映画の舞台は和歌山県太地町。イルカの知能が極めて高いことが強調され、米国人ダイバーが入り江に潜入し、隠しカメラ を設置。漁師が大量のイルカを追い込み、モリで突き、海が血で染まるシーンが登場。上映は７月３１日に始まり、ロサンゼルス・タイムズ紙は「虐殺の入り江」との見出しで映画を評価。ニューヨーク・タイムズ紙（７月３１日付）も「海が血で染まり、（鑑賞者の）目は涙であふれる」とする評論を載せた。
◇
和歌山県太地町の三軒一高町長は「そういう映画が制作されていることも、撮影に来たことも知らなかった。作品を見ていないのでコメントのしようが ない」と話している。ただ、同町の姉妹都市オーストラリア・ブルーム市には、姉妹関係解消への圧力がかかっているとの情報があるという。
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関連記事
Los Angels Times
'The Cove' was covert, dangerous filmmaking
Roadside Attractions
It helps to have a billionaire, plus a dedicated activist, a neophyte filmmaker, two of the world's best free-divers, a former avionics specialist from the Canadian Air Force, a logistics whiz trained in transporting pop-music stars around the world, a maritime technician, a military infrared camera for night cinematography, unmanned aerial drones, a blimp and fake rocks specially designed by George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic to hold secret cameras.
Also required? A willingness to risk arrest, police harassment and potentially much worse.
Related
- STORY:
'The Cove'
Unlike their larger cetacean brethren whales, dolphins are not protected by the worldwide ban on commercial whaling that has been in effect since the 1980s. Taiji, a bucolic town filled with boats bearing the images of happy dolphins, is, as shown in the film, essentially a dolphin bazaar for marine theme parks hunting for their next attraction, and they are willing to pay $150,000 per dolphin. Unselected dolphins are herded into a heavily protected secret cove where they're slaughtered for food, never mind the fact that, as the film makes clear, dolphin meat is chock-full of mercury -- or as one on-screen scientist states: The creatures are essentially swimming toxic waste dumps.
The $2.5-million film, three years in the making, was born of the friendship between National Geographic photographer Louie Psihoyos and Netscape founder Jim Clark, old dive buddies who spent the last 10 years traveling the world searching for the best reefs, which they soon realized were dramatically deteriorating each time they returned.
Psihoyos recalls being in the Galapagos Islands and watching "long-line fisherman fishing in a marine sanctuary" and seeing "bombed out reefs in Indonesia." In response to the devastation, Clark launched the nonprofit environmental group the Oceanic Preservation Society, and Psihoyos began working on what initially was going to be four TV documentaries about the endangered oceans and their species.
Psihoyos started attending mammal conferences and stumbled upon the hero of his documentary, Ric O'Barry, in 2005. The 68-year old O'Barry, an endearing and obsessed activist, was the original trainer of the five dolphins who played "Flipper" on TV and blames himself for the worldwide popularity of commercial sea parks with their live dolphin acts, a practice he now decries. "A lot of the dolphins in the third world are in people's swimming pools. It's a copycat syndrome," says O'Barry, now a marine mammal specialist for the Earth Island Institute, and leader of the Save Japan Dolphins coalition. "People go to Sea World, and say, 'Wow I can do that.' There're dolphins all over the Caribbean, and Mexico -- the whole area is like a dolphin theme park with deplorable conditions. When I see them there, I feel directly responsible. I know the TV series helped to contribute to this mess. There are $2 billion in profits that come from the captive dolphins."
Filmmaking 101
At the time, O'Barry was on his way to Taiji, where he's been going several times a year in an effort to stop the slaughter, often with journalists in tow, and he invited Psihoyos to join him. Seeing the filmic potential in the trip, Psihoyos signed on, although the acclaimed photographer first decided to take a three-day filmmaking course.
"We're all professionals, just not at this," says Psihoyos, with a laugh. "I don't know if this movie could have been made by a professional crew. A professional crew would have turned around and ran. A producer would say 'This is nuts. How long is it going to take? How much is it going to cost?' There were just too many unknowns. The risk of getting hurt or jailed was daily. It didn't take filmmakers to make this film. It took pirates."
Indeed, the film depicts two commando missions into the cove, which is surrounded by razor-wire fences and policed by vigilant fisherman, desperate to keep their business out of the spotlight. There were actually 14 cloak-and-dagger operations into the protected cove to accumulate enough footage, and a dedicated runner who every day personally and craftily spirited the film out of town. "The reality was a lot scarier than the film shows," Psihoyos says. "We got ran out of town by the police twice." These days, when O'Barry makes his still frequent pilgrimages to Taiji, he always goes in full-blown disguise.
Clark brought in another diver buddy, actor-filmmaker Fisher Stevens ("Short Circuit"), to produce and comb through the nearly 600 hours of film. Stevens in turn brought in other professionals, including editor Geoffrey Richman ("Murderball" and "Sicko") and writer Mark Monroe.
Stevens insisted that Psihoyos actually become the on-screen narrator of the story, providing a charismatic and handsome figure through which to tell the story. "He didn't want to do it at first," recalls Stevens, who eventually convinced him. "The idea was this is not a just a documentary -- it's more like a thriller."
Psihoyos says that many of his stories for National Geographic had "an activist bent," but he also had maintained the belief that "a journalist is supposed to be a fly on the wall, he's not supposed to be part of the story. Still I realized if nobody gets active, then nothing would get resolved. I felt it was time to stand up."
Psihoyos and O'Barry hope the film will generate awareness and help bring change to the situation in Taiji. As a country, Japan has also opposed extending the international whaling ban to dolphins. Speaking before the film's commercial release, O'Barry noted, "[The Japanese] don't know this tsunami of bad publicity is coming their way. In Japan, they call it 'giatsu,' which translates into external pressure. . . .[This] movie is giatsu on a massive scale."
rachel.abramowitz
@latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-dolphin1-2009aug01,0,1040730.story
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'The Cove'
"The Cove's" story of a quiet village in Japan that specializes in clandestine dolphin slaughter is quite consciously structured as a thriller by director Louie Psihoyos who won an audience award for it at Sundance.
The film follows a group of determined environmental commandos as it attempts to document what goes on in a deceptively tranquil lagoon. The leader of the group, and hands down the most compelling person in the film, is Ric O'Barry, who became famous decades ago as the man who both captured and trained the five dolphins who collectively became TV's Flipper and so helped start the multimillion-dollar seaquarium industry.
First-time director Psihoyos, a National Geographic photographer who is one of the founders of the Oceanic Preservation Society, got interested in O'Barry when the man was barred from speaking at a marine conference. O'Barry told him about the town of Taiji, which masquerades as a dolphin-friendly spot but is quite the opposite.
For as "The Cove" takes pains to document, Taiji is, as O'Barry puts it with typical drama, "a dolphin's worst nightmare." Local fisherman drive the dolphins to that cove, an area that's protected from the prying eyes of outsiders by high fences and razor wire.
Then trainers, who have flown in from seaquariums all over the world, line up and take their pick of the candidates for $150,000 per animal. Finally, those dolphins not selected as future performers are simply butchered as part of a clandestine market for dolphin meat, so secret that even most Japanese don't know of it.
Given the controversial nature of all this, Taiji's city government is hardly eager for a Western crew to get it all down on camera. Police shadow the filmmakers everywhere, and the local fishermen, who fear the loss of revenue, aggressively confront the visitors, hoping to provoke actions that will get the foreigners expelled from the country.
Undaunted, O'Barry and Psihoyos put together a kind of dream team of environmental activists with counter-insurgency skills. Cameras are secreted in realistic fake rocks created by George Lucas' ILM, and world-class free-divers place other cameras under water. The object, says the director, is "not just to capture the slaughter but to make people want to change."
The footage that results is graphic and bloody enough to make the sea run bright red, but because it has an activist slant, "The Cove" makes points that don't depend on those shots for their effectiveness. We learn a lot about dolphin intelligence, witness the ineffectiveness of the International Whaling Commission in the face of Japanese lobbying, and learn how the high mercury levels in dolphin meat bring to mind the earlier mercury poisoning scandal at Minamata.
The small town of Taiji is far from the only place where the 23,000 dolphins that are killed worldwide per year meet their end, but what the town does has symbolic value for all concerned. "If we can't fix that," O'Barry says flatly, "forget about the bigger issues. There's no hope."
--------------------------------------------------
'The Cove'
"The Cove's" story of a quiet village in Japan that specializes in clandestine dolphin slaughter is quite consciously structured as a thriller by director Louie Psihoyos who won an audience award for it at Sundance.
But after Kathy, the main "Flipper" dolphin, died in his arms, O'Barry had a major change of heart and became an uncompromising free-the-dolphins zealot. "I was as ignorant as I could be for as long as I could be," he explains. "I spent 10 years building, and the next 35 trying to tear down."
First-time director Psihoyos, a National Geographic photographer who is one of the founders of the Oceanic Preservation Society, got interested in O'Barry when the man was barred from speaking at a marine conference. O'Barry told him about the town of Taiji, which masquerades as a dolphin-friendly spot but is quite the opposite.
Then trainers, who have flown in from seaquariums all over the world, line up and take their pick of the candidates for $150,000 per animal. Finally, those dolphins not selected as future performers are simply butchered as part of a clandestine market for dolphin meat, so secret that even most Japanese don't know of it.
Given the controversial nature of all this, Taiji's city government is hardly eager for a Western crew to get it all down on camera. Police shadow the filmmakers everywhere, and the local fishermen, who fear the loss of revenue, aggressively confront the visitors, hoping to provoke actions that will get the foreigners expelled from the country.
Undaunted, O'Barry and Psihoyos put together a kind of dream team of environmental activists with counter-insurgency skills. Cameras are secreted in realistic fake rocks created by George Lucas' ILM, and world-class free-divers place other cameras under water. The object, says the director, is "not just to capture the slaughter but to make people want to change."
The footage that results is graphic and bloody enough to make the sea run bright red, but because it has an activist slant, "The Cove" makes points that don't depend on those shots for their effectiveness. We learn a lot about dolphin intelligence, witness the ineffectiveness of the International Whaling Commission in the face of Japanese lobbying, and learn how the high mercury levels in dolphin meat bring to mind the earlier mercury poisoning scandal at Minamata.
The small town of Taiji is far from the only place where the 23,000 dolphins that are killed worldwide per year meet their end, but what the town does has symbolic value for all concerned. "If we can't fix that," O'Barry says flatly, "forget about the bigger issues. There's no hope."
http://www.latimes.com/la-et-cove31-2009jul31,0,5473483.story
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New York Times
The Cove (2008)
NYT Critics' Pick This movie has been designated a Critic's Pick by the film reviewers of The Times.From Flipper's Trainer to Dolphin Defender
When the director Louie Psihoyos slipped into the little coastal town of Taiji, Japan, it was under cover of documenting the degradation of ocean reefs. Once there, however, he proceeded to mount one of the most audacious and perilous operations in the history of the conservation movement.
"The Cove" is much more than just a record of that adventure. Like the director's cover story, the movie is a Trojan horse: an exceptionally well-made documentary that unfolds like a spy thriller, complete with bugged hotel rooms, clandestine derring-do and mysterious men in gray flannel suits. Those men — perhaps cops, perhaps worse — tail Mr. Psihoyos and his crew unrelentingly, determined to prevent anyone from filming the enormously lucrative dolphin capture and slaughter that support the town's economy and employ its fishermen.
This killing may be legal — dolphins and other small marine mammals are not protected by the ban on commercial whaling — but, as we shall see, the methods used are so nonchalantly brutal and gut-churningly primitive that Taiji officials are understandably publicity-shy. (And, we learn later, there are other secrets lurking beneath the town's thriving tourist industry and cute, dolphin-shape pleasure boats.) Consequently, anyone straying too close to the kill zone — a secluded lagoon protected by steep cliffs, manned tunnels and razor-wire gates — is violently harassed by videocam-wielding fishermen hoping to record an imprisonable offense.
None of which fazes Mr. Psihoyos, an urbane eco-warrior who pops up periodically to provide context and clarification. His soothing tones, however, can't disguise a relish for the fray: beneath the silver-fox exterior beats a rabble-rousing heart. ("You try to do the story legally," he insists, eyes twinkling in remembrance of every cloak-and-dagger move.) That heart invigorates every frame of "The Cove," as does Mr. Psihoyos's eye for a powerful image (his photographs have graced many an issue of National Geographic) and savvy narrative style: this is no angry enviro-rant but a living, breathing movie whose horrifying disclosures feel fully earned.
Seduced by the familiar rhythms of the heist thriller, we watch as Mr. Psihoyos recruits his dream team — including a former avionics engineer with the Canadian Air Force and a pair of champion free divers — and turns it loose. Planting ingeniously camouflaged, state-of-the-art equipment in and around their target, they capture sights and sounds of uncommon beauty and quiet revelation: a group of fishermen reminiscing about blue-whale pods as dense as "a clump of bamboo" and a ghostly, thermal handprint clinging to a gatepost like arcane spoor. Viewed from below, the hypnotically graceful progress of a free diver resembles nothing so much as an undulating mermaid with a giant can opener for a tail — an inadvertent clue to the movie's intentions.
Adroitly assembled by the award-winning editor Geoffrey Richman, the movie's many interviews and interests (ranging from dolphin-human relations to the mystery of where all that slaughtered meat ends up) interweave seamlessly. And if the film's villains are sometimes difficult to untangle, it could be because one of them, the worldwide marine-park industry, is not formally represented; it could also be because without our patronage, that industry would not exist.
Heroes, however, are instantly identifiable, like the shy Japanese councilmen who risk their jobs to protect schoolchildren from mercury-tainted dolphin meat. But "The Cove," like the dolphins, would be lost without Richard O'Barry, who captured and trained all five of the animals who made Flipper a television star and a household name and sparked the craze for performing sea mammals. His drooping eyes and sagging shoulders testify to the bone-deep exhaustion of someone who has spent the last 35 years atoning, and when he gate-crashes a meeting of the International Whaling Commission, the video screen strapped to his chest is like a physical manifestation of decades of guilt.
"If a dolphin is in trouble anywhere in the world, my phone rings," he says. (We don't need to be told that his heart breaks.) You may not give a fig for dolphins, but Mr. O'Barry is giving enough for us all.
"The Cove" is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Blood in the water and tears in the eyes.
THE COVE
Opens on Friday in Manhattan.
Directed by Louie Psihoyos; written by Mark Monroe; edited by Geoffrey Richman; music by J. Ralph; produced by Fisher Stevens and Paula DuPré Pesmen; released by Roadside Attractions. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/07/31/movies/31cove.html?scp=1&sq=the%20cove&st=cse
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In a Killing Cove, Siding With Dolphins
Dolphins and diver in "The Cove," a documentary directed by Louie Psihoyos, below, about the clandestine slaughter of dolphins in a Japanese seaside town.
LIKE many people in his generation, Louie Psihoyos was a landlubber who grew up watching "Flipper" and Jacques Cousteau adventures on television. After National Geographic magazine hired him straight out of college as a staff photographer, his admiration for the intelligence and beauty of dolphins, and for the oceans as an ecological system, grew as he learned how to dive and began to work underwater.
Related
Trailer: 'The Cove' 
Dolphins performing at an aquatic park in Taiji, Japan, a small seaside town south of Osaka where most of "The Cove" was filmed.
But none of that quite prepared him for the experience of making "The Cove," an award-winning documentary about the clandestine slaughter of dolphins in Japan that opens July 31. The film is the first that Mr. Psihoyos — "rhymes with sequoias," he said — has directed, and everything about it has been a challenge, from having to make the transition from still photography, to the subject matter itself, to the cloak-and-dagger techniques used to obtain images that range, as Mr. Psihoyos put it, "from the heartbreakingly beautiful to the heartbreakingly sad."
"The Cove," in other words, is an unconventional documentary, one that looks very much like a feature film, with the dramatic arcs and suspense one would expect in a James Bond or Hollywood action movie. And because the film contains graphic images of the mass killing of a species of animal that humans regard fondly, with images as unsettling as those of baby seals being clubbed to death in Canada, it seems destined to generate an emotional and contentious debate.
Which is exactly what Mr. Psihoyos, 52, had in mind when he began filming "The Cove" in 2005. "What I set out to do was not so much make a movie as to create a movement," he said by telephone from his office in Boulder, Colo. "This movie is a tool to shut this thing down and end the barbarism we saw back there in that cove."
Commercial whaling has been outlawed worldwide since the mid-1980s, but that prohibition has not been extended to smaller cetaceans, or marine mammals, like dolphins, in large part because of Japan's opposition. As a result around 21,000 dolphins are killed there each year, according to Japanese government estimates, in places like Taiji, a small seaside town south of Osaka where most of "The Cove" was filmed
Some of Mr. Psihoyos's footage from Taiji, which the movie calls "a little town with a really big secret," shows local fishermen and their allies trying to block his cameras and trailing and intimidating him and his crew. The fishermen seem to fear that if images of their bloody and brutal annual harvest, for food purposes and for what they call "pest control," become widely known, the public in Japan and abroad will be so horrified and disgusted that it will demand an end to the slaughter.
In addition to its cast of dolphins "The Cove" has a central human character: Ric O'Barry, the original trainer of the five dolphins used to portray Flipper on the mid-1960s television series. He later became an ardent environmentalist campaigner and now serves as a marine mammal specialist for the Earth Island Institute in California and is the leader of the Save Japan Dolphins coalition.
Although Mr. O'Barry, 68, may be the protagonist of the film, he makes for an admittedly flawed hero. Not content to be simply passionate, he comes across as obsessed with his cause and interested in little else. But he said he is satisfied with the way he is portrayed in "The Cove" and grateful for the galvanizing effect he expects the film to have.
"I think it's very fair, because I am a little crazed," he said. "I am focused like a laser beam on the dolphin captivity issue, because I helped create this mess. I think about that cove every day, because once you have seen what goes on there — not the movie but the real thing — you can't unsee it. So maybe I have crossed a line."
"The Cove" has the feel and flow of a feature film in part because it did not suffer from the financial constraints that often afflict documentaries. One of Mr. Psihoyos's dive buddies is Jim Clark, the billionaire founder of Netscape, who started the environmental group known as the Oceanic Preservation Society along with Mr. Psihoyos and agreed to bankroll "The Cove" more out of conviction than a desire to add to his bank account.
Mr. Psihoyos refers to the production team he hired, which included a pair of free divers, a maritime technician and a "clandestine operations" organizer, as "Oceans 11." At one point they asked Industrial Lights & Magic, the George Lucas special effects company, to make fake rocks that could hide high-definition cameras and microphones, which were then secretly installed at the cove in Taiji.
In addition some of the filming was done at night, with the crew in camouflage and face paint and using military-style thermal cameras to film the fishermen and police officers who were trying to keep them away from the cove. Part of that material has ended up in the film, as has footage shot from unmanned aerial drones and a blimp equipped with a remote-controlled camera.
"We didn't need filmmakers to make this film, we needed pirates," Mr. Psihoyos said. "The joke on the set was that we are all professionals, but not at this, and the truth is that the real heavy lifting was done by nonfilmmakers."
Even after shooting dozens of hours of film Mr. Psihoyos wasn't sure what he had. Early last year another dive enthusiast from Mr. Clark's circle, the television and film actor and director Fisher Stevens, was brought on board as a producer to help sort things out.
"When we went through the footage, we all agreed that this is Ric's story," Mr. Stevens said. "I also saw these crazy guys trying to get their footage with thermal cameras, but I had to convince Louie, who has an amazing visual style, that he had to be in the film as the storyteller. He didn't want to do it at first, but in the end we sat down and replotted and broke it down into acts, just like a feature, to make it as entertaining as possible."
If a distributor can be found in Japan, "The Cove" is likely to generate controversy for reasons that go beyond the killings shown in the film. After Mr. Psihoyos asked scientists to run tests, extremely high concentrations of mercury were found in some of the dolphin meat sold in Japanese supermarkets; the same was the case for some meat labeled there as whale, which fetches a higher price, but which actually turned out to have come from dolphins.
In a country still scarred by memories of Minamata disease, which first appeared in the mid-1950s in a coastal town whose waters had been polluted by a chemical plant, that can only be alarming news. Minamata disease is a form of mercury poisoning, caused by the consumption of contaminated fish, that has killed more than 1,000 people in Japan and has been blamed for nerve damage and congenital defects in thousands of others there.
Responding by e-mail to a set of written questions, Shuya Nakatsuka, a first secretary at the Japanese Embassy in Washington who is in charge of fisheries issues, took exception with some of the main arguments of "The Cove."
He acknowledged that the Japanese government has advised pregnant women to avoid eating dolphin meat because of the mercury but said that "there is no campaign to prevent the Japanese public from knowing about what is happening to dolphins," and that "information about the conservation and management of dolphins and fisheries is publicly available."
Since "each government is responsible for the management of dolphins within its waters," Mr. Nakatsuka wrote, "the Japanese government will continue to authorize the use of dolphins at a sustainable level."
He added that "the catch quota of dolphins is set by the Japanese government based on scientific information to maintain the stock level for sustainable use." Because "many dietary habits and food cultures are historically established," he wrote, it is incumbent upon foreigners "to recognize national and cultural differences."
Ending the mass killing of dolphins for commercial purposes is not the only goal of "The Cove" however. Mr. O'Barry said he hoped that scenes filmed in Taiji, showing what he says are representatives of marine amusement parks selecting young female dolphins for purchase, training and exhibition, will also turn public opinion against the use of the animals for entertainment.
Though Mr. O'Barry's first job after he left the Navy was at Miami Seaquarium, which led to his being hired for "Flipper," he long ago became an adversary of the amusement park industry. He was arrested for freeing dolphins from a park in the Bahamas and at the moment is being sued for $300 million by an aquatic park in the Dominican Republic that alleges he interfered with its business.
"The misinformation in the movie is pretty devastating," said Marilee Menard, executive director of the Alliance of Marine Mammal Parks and Aquariums, a trade group representing more than 50 such facilities in the United States and abroad. "It is not as he is saying, that all aquariums and parks are acquiring these animals. Our members have a tremendous breeding program, follow strict guidelines, condemn these practices and have none of these animals from Japan in our parks."
Mr. Psihoyos, however, is not backing down. He said his only concern was whether a mass audience will respond to "The Cove," which has a PG-13 rating, with the same enthusiasm that has greeted the film at Sundance and other festivals, where the response was standing ovations and queries about how to "stop the war against dolphins."
"To translate that to theatrical success is what terrifies me," Mr. Psihoyos said. "I'm very conscious that when you go see a movie like this, it's not just $10 and a box of popcorn. I wanted to make sure that every frame, every second, is considered, and I believe I've accomplished what I set out to do. Now the scary part is trying to fill theaters."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/movies/19roht.html?_r=1&sq=the%20cove&st=cse&scp=2&pagewanted=all
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Film "The Cove" Seeks to Expose Dolphin Killings
Filed at 1:46 p.m. ET
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NEW YORK (Reuters) - A tense new film shows Japanese fishermen luring thousands of wild dolphins into a hidden secret cove in Japan where activists say they are captured for marine amusement parks or slaughtered for food.
"The Cove" follows a team of activists including former dolphin trainer from the "Flipper" television series Ric O'Barry.
They battle Japanese police and fisherman to gain access to a cove in Taiji, Japan, where barbed wire blocks people from filming dolphin killings that begin in September each year.
The documentary opens in the United States on Friday but has yet to receive distribution in Japan, where O'Barry says 23,000 dolphins and porpoises are legally killed each year.
The Japanese government said it has done nothing wrong and cites cultural differences in response to the film.
Dolphin meat is eaten by a very small percentage of Japanese people.
The film has already been praised by critics and won the audience award at this year's Sundance Film Festival. "Eco-activist documentaries don't get much more compelling than 'The Cove'," said Variety's review.
O'Barry, who has been visiting Taiji several times a year for the past eight years and now wears disguises in the town to avoid the attention of fisherman and the police, predicted the film would have a big impact.
"When the film is seen in Japan, it will shut 'the cove' down permanently," he said in a recent interview.
The 69-year-old says he began fighting against the captivity of dolphins when one of the animals he trained for the hit 1960s TV show "Flipper" voluntarily stopped breathing until it died.
"Ric is a hero," said the film's director, Louie Psihoyos, who has photographed for National Geographic magazine. "He had success, he had fame, he had money and he turned his back on all of that to follow his conscience."
TOXIC OCEANS
The film turns into a gripping action-adventure using hi-tech cameras to film the efforts of Psihoyos and a team including underwater sound and camera experts as well as champion free divers to film inside the cove.
"The film is about leading an 'Ocean's Eleven' kind of team into this secret cove to try to reveal its dark secrets," said Psihoyos, referring to the popular Hollywood film about a top notch team who break into impossible places. "It was extremely scary."
But "The Cove" largely examines environmental issues, including Japan's efforts to persuade the International Whaling Commission (IWC) to lift a ban on commercial whaling introduced in 1986. The ban does not apply to smaller cetaceans including dolphins.
The film argues that toxic waste dumped into the ocean has caused higher levels of mercury poisoning found in larger species of ocean life, including dolphins.
A spokeswoman for the Japanese embassy in Washington, Izumi Yamanaka, said in an e-mail the area surrounding Taiji had traditional dietary habits of eating dolphin meat and that Japan adhered to IWC rules.
"The Japanese government believes that it is most important to recognize national and cultural differences," she said.
She added Japan complied with laws that advise pregnant women against eating seafood, including dolphin meat, with high levels of mercury, and would investigate assertions in the film that dolphin meat is sold in Japan disguised as whale meat.
Dolphin hunts are largely driven by a multibillion dollar marine amusement park industry located in the United States and around the world, who pay up to $150,000 per dolphin, according to O'Barry.
"People who see this movie are going to think twice before they buy a ticket to a dolphin show," he said.
Ultimately the film is part of a larger story of the destruction of the oceans and planet, the filmmakers said.
"'The Cove' is a microcosm for the poisoning of the oceans," said Psihoyos. "A hundred years from now they are going to say this is the generation that could have turned things around."
(Editing by Sandra Maler)
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/07/31/arts/entertainment-us-cove.html?scp=4&sq=the%20cove&st=cse
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