Movie Review: The Cove

Miami Herald

Here is the way Richard O'Barry describes himself: He spent 10 years building up the captive-dolphin industry -- and the last 35 years trying to tear it down.

O'Barry is the Miami-based trainer who caught and wrangled the five mammals that in the 1960s played in Flipper, the TV show that inadvertently kickstarted the country's fascination with dolphins.

Today, though, in the documentary The Cove, O'Barry leads a covert mission to film the horrifying slaughter of dolphins in the Japanese town of Taiji and bursts into a meeting of the International Whaling Commission with a video monitor playing footage of the killing strapped to his chest.

A passionate activist who has generated great controversy (and an arrest record) with his zero-tolerance attitude toward dolphin captivity, O'Barry first visited Taiji in 2003, lured by rumors of seasonal dolphin captures and butchering.

Although the killings took place in a heavily guarded cove lined with steep cliffs on three sides, there was enough visible activity by the government-sanctioned fishermen for O'Barry to shoot graphic footage for a DVD intended to attract the attention of the world media.

But his efforts got few nibbles.

"I couldn't get any media to come see this unbelievable thing that was going on," O'Barry says. "I couldn't share it with anybody. I was trying to get the Japanese media interested, but there is a blackout on dolphin and whale news in Japan. I would stand in the street in Tokyo, showing a DVD to people who passed by on the sidewalk, and not one of them knew it was going on."

O'Barry intended to play the DVD at a marine conference in San Diego at which he was a keynote speaker. When his appearance was abruptly canceled by the conference's sponsor, a famous marine attraction, O'Barry caught the attention of Louie Psihoyos, a National Geographic photographer and co-founder of the Oceanic Preservation Society (OPS). Psihoyos accepted Barry's invitation to travel to Taiji and see the killing grounds first hand.

"You couldn't believe this place was real," Psihoyos says of his initial impressions of Taiji. "On the surface, everything around you said 'We love dolphins and whales.' And smack in the middle of the town, between the whaling museum and the town hall, there's this fortified secret cove that even Japanese people can't go into where they do nothing but kill dolphins."

The discovery of what Psihoyos refers to as "a little town with a big secret" gave the newly formed OPS the foundation for its first production. Founded in 2005, the nonprofit society brings together like-minded photographers, filmmakers and activists to create visual media that will bring the environmental plight of the oceans to the widest possible audience.

"Our initial plan was to make a series of documentaries about different problems and situations around the world," says Joseph D. Chisholm, production coordinator for OPS. "Louie and his team had been traveling around the planet for a year and a half, documenting the degradation of the reefs and the ongoing pollution of off-shore dive areas, when he met Rick and headed off to Japan."

Once the filmmakers decided to focus on Taiji, they began thinking of tactics that would allow them to sneak cameras into the cove.

Among the people who joined their cause was Air Force veteran Simon Hutchins, expedition director for OPS, who brought his military experience to the filmmakers' tactics of avoiding the local police.

"The authorities always treated us with the utmost respect, but they were always around, trying to figure out what they could charge us with and put us in jail and out of the game," Hutchins says. "The charge we feared the most was conspiracy to disrupt commerce."

The Cove shows how O'Barry and his crew achieved their mission despite constantly being trailed by Taiji police officers, who warned the filmmakers: "I hope you don't enter the prohibited place."

In the process, the movie also explores the increasing problem of overfishing, the toxicity of much of the fish we eat today and the way in which dolphin meat is being passed off as whale meat to an unsuspecting Japanese public.

And although The Cove, which won the Audience Award for U.S. Documentary at its Sundance Film Festival premiere in January, is now getting wide U.S. exposure, the filmmakers hope it also will be seen in Japan.

"If we could get a few million people in Japan to see it, that would be a huge coup," Hutchins says, although there are yet no plans to distribute The Cove there.

"We'll probably have to put it on the Internet for free," O'Barry says. "But we'll do whatever we have to do. The Japanese people are much more sensitive to clean food than we are. If they see that a lot of the expensive whale shops in Japan are actually serving cheap dolphin meat, it's all over. This film has the power to not only stop the largest slaughter of dolphins in the world but to bring down whaling once and for all."

For more information on the Oceanic Preservation Society and its efforts, visit www.opsociety.org.

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