The Cove

[Eija Niskanen]

Mark,

during last fall's TIFF screening, the director Psihoyas also
underlined the mercury issue, so it seems to be the argumentative line
the filmmakers have been carrying since complating the film. Besides
being sold as whale meat, dolphine meat is put into pet foods, without
labeling it as such. Might be a concern for all those owners of cute
little dogs.

Eija

On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 4:48 PM, Mark Roberts
<mroberts37 at mail-central.com> wrote:
> W.r.t. the sentimentality of "The Cove", I would have to agree with Kore'eda
> that it's an issue (although it did provide a perfect lead in for the rather
> good "South Park" parody). In a way, it seems like the film tries to pursue
> too many different sorts of claims, with debatable results. On that note,
> though, one thing that struck me during the press screening last September
> concerned the treatment of Ric O'Barry. As the main protagonist of the film,
> his appeal to the audience seems grounded in animal rights activism, which
> tends to veer towards the sentimental.
>
> During the Q & A following the screening, though, O'Barry had a very
> different tone. As I recall, he didn't say much of anything about the film's
> animal rights appeal, he didn't try to elaborate or reinforce it, and one
> might say that he even seemed to distance himself from it. Instead, he
> hammered on the mercury problem and its global dimensions. For O'Barry,
> there was more or less a direct line from Minamata to Taiji, and he
> emphasized that this was the real import of the film. He held up a recent
> book on the Niigata Minamata disease by book by Saitô Hisashi that had just
> been published last September:
> <http://sites.google.com/site/niigataminamata/> (I haven't checked it, but
> this might be one of the most recent significant works on the problem).
> O'Barry's message to the assembled journalists was basically: "it's your job
> to investigate this -- get going."
>
> I can't say that I've taken an exhaustive look at the recent press coverage,
> but in what I've seen it's striking that the focus is more on the issue of
> cultural sensitivity than the rather more serious problem of rising mercury
> levels in the global food supply. The recent Japan Today article, for
> example, includes the statement "Most Japanese have never eaten dolphin
> meat." If the claims of the film are correct, though, Japanese who think
> they are eating whale meat may actually be getting dolphin meat instead, and
> it contains dangerous levels of mercury.
>
> Following the press screening last year, I found myself wondering whether
> O'Barry had changed his tone after the production of the film, or previous
> press conferences, i.e., from an animal rights to a global pollution appeal
> (from particular to universal), or whether the director had chosen to
> present him more as an animal rights activist, as a way to increase the
> film's pathos.
>
> Regards,
>
> M. Roberts
>
>



-- 
Eija Niskanen
Kichijoji Honcho 4-12-6
Musashino-shi
Tokyo 180-0004