“The Cove,” a documentary film directed by Louie Psihoyos, examines the clandestine killings of dolphins by fishermen in Japan.

Documenting a secret slaughter, a filmmaker aims to stir outrage.


By LARRY ROHTER


After National Geographic magazine hired Louie Psihoyos straight out of college as a staff photographer, his admiration for the intelligence and beauty of dolphins grew as he learned how to dive and to work underwater.

But none of that prepared him for the experience of making “The Cove,” an award-winning documentary about the clandestine slaughter of dolphins in Japan that opens in the United States and Singapore this summer. The film is the first he has directed, and everything about it has been a challenge, from the the subject matter to the secretive 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, with the drama one would expect in an action movie. And because the film contains graphic images of the mass killing of a species of animal that humans regard fondly, it seems destined to generate debate.

Which is what Mr. Psihoyos, 52, had in mind. “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, Colorado. “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 1980s, but that ban 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 shows fishermen trying to block his cameras and intimidate him and his crew. The fishermen seem to fear that if images of their bloody 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 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 1960s American television series. He later became an ardent environmentalist, and is now a marine mammal specialist for the Earth Island Institute in California and the leader of the Save Japan Dolphins coalition.

Mr. O’Barry, 68, makes an admittedly flawed hero. Not content to be simply passionate, he comes across as obsessed with his cause. He has been arrested for freeing dolphins from a park in the Bahamas. “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.”

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, would also turn public opinion against the use of the animals for entertainment.

Marilee Menard, executive director of the Alliance of Marine Mammal Parks and Aquariums, a trade group representing more than 50 such facilities, said “the misinformation in the film is pretty devastating.” She added the members of her group “condemn these practices and have none of these animals from Japan in our parks.”