We can apparently add Louie Psihoyos’s documentary The Cove to our list of Movies That Really Made a Difference. The secret-camera-employed expose on the slaughter of dolphins in Taiji, Japan, is getting credit, at least in part, with a stoppage of the dolphin killing, the season for which would have begun this week.
Dolphin activist and trainer Richard O’Barry, who appears in Psihoyos’ film, showed up to protest as usual accompanied by a group of international journalists and media crews, only to find the titular location void of fishermen.
He immediately reported his happy discovery to Take Part, writing, “it is a good day for the dolphins. And for me personally, as the police only wanted to talk with me, not arrest me!”
While this is certainly good news, it’s also not surprising that a documentary dealing with the killing of animals would be more successful in its goal than the countless films raising awareness of human genocides and poverty.
Of course, this is a sign that documentary as activism can make a difference, so I don’t mean to be cynical. I honestly hope that The Cove will be made an example and that other films inspire similar change.
Check out what other film bloggers are saying about The Cove’s success after the jump:
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MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center have released the schedule for New Directors/New Films, and as in the past, it’s heavy on films that recently played Sundance, including award winners (Push, We Live in Public, The Cove and The Maid). I’m looking forward to catching Amreeka (the ND/NF opening night film), Stay the Same Never Change and Unmade Beds, all of which I missed in Park City, as well as Bob Byington’s Harmony and Me, a world premiere starring Justin Rice.
indieWIRE has the full lineup. ND/NF starts March 25.
Yesterday, for the second time in two weeks, In Contention’s Kristopher Tapley confessed to being done with 2008 and noted a bunch of anticipated 2009 films. These aren’t necessarily titles he’s looking forward to seeing, though; it’s basically a preliminary jump on next year’s Oscar season. Because apparently this year’s Academy Awards are all but handed out, the winners properly predicted and expected, and now it’s time to think about what will be up for what in 2010. Those titles Tapley lists are Rob Marshall’s Nine, Peter Jackson’s Lovely Bones, Michael Mann’s Public Enemies, Clint Eastwood’s “Mandela“ (formerly The Human Factor), Richard Curtis’ The Boat That Rocked, Scott Cooper’s Crazy Heart and the latest from Terrence Malick (The Tree of Life), Steven Soderbergh (The Informant), Paul Greengrass (Green Zone), Martin Scorsese (Shutter Island) and James Cameron (Avatar).
Oh, and then Jeff Wells had to go and hint that Spielberg’s Lincoln is likely to arrive by year’s end. What and who else is being foreseen as nominated this time next year? Check out the links after the jump.
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This year’s Sundance featured firsthand accounts of human rights violations in Darfur (Reporter), Tibet (Tibet in Song) and Burma (Burma VJ), so what does it say about me that the documentary that reduced me to a burbling mess was The Cove, a white-knuckle critique of dolphin killing in Japan? The truth is, it may actually reveal less about me than it does the tactics by which the films position their respective causes for audiences — one of the many subjects director Eric Daniel Metzgar contemplates with Reporter.
In his philosophically introspective doc, Metzgar accompanies New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof on his ventures through Africa, deconstructing the methods he uses to convey the atrocities he witnesses there back to his readers in the West (a heavy burden, considering that his writing has the power — or the potential, at least — to influence world leaders). It was Kristof, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, who helped alert the world to the fact that there was a genocide occurring in Darfur.
Metzgar approaches Kristof’s reporting with a healthy skepticism, just as all moviegoers would be advised to handle agenda-driven docs (he explains why victims can be unreliable, causes can obscure logical reasoning and so on). Incorporating himself in the process from the very beginning, Metzgar quotes Kristof’s mission as “to make you care about what’s just over the hill,” raising red flags as the journalist seeks out worst-case atrocities to write about everywhere he goes. In a Congolese camp, Kristof passes over horror stories deemed not depressing enough before training his attention on a withered 41-year-old woman, Yohanita, who was raped by soldiers, saw her fields pillaged and now teeters on the brink of death.
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