The Cove Movie Shows in Toyko

“First comes the noise … then comes the capture … Last comes the kill. They spear the dolphins, haul them into their boats with hooks and then motor through the bloody water, leaving behind a punchbowl of death … with young dolphins throwing themselves on the rocks in attempt to escape. All in a national park area. ”

Despite often ridiculous levels of resistance, interference and ingenious neglect, The Cove and director Louie Psihoyos made their debuts at the Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF) yesterday and largely stole the show. He reports of his experience: here. See CCN footage of film crews being removed from the festival, made to wait in a fire escape and not ask questions: here.

Teams of news crews were turned away, banned from the film festival property. The festival planners roped off the green carpet, there wasn’t a single poster up of The Cove around the grounds.

TIFF initially refused to include The Cove in its green “Action for the Earth!” themed 2009 festival because of its “sensitive” (i.e., blood-drenched, Japan-critical) nature. A decision overturned due to persistent interventions by Hollywood ‘Cove supporters’, such as Ben Stiller, and TIFF jury president Alejandro González Iñárritu who, with other free speech advocates, pressured organizers to relent and include it the line-up.

Acceptance did not mean endorsement, however, and TIFF continued to undercut the screening, especially after the town of Taiji threatened to sue the festival for showing the film and right wingers vowed to protest with their deafening PA trucks. The film was first assigned an inconspicuous 10:30 am slot in a 165-seat venue on Wednesday 21 October, instantly selling out online. When pressed to assign an additional venue, TIFF officials scheduled a 9:00 am “press only” showing on Sunday 18 October … but forgot to notify the press corps that the showing had been arranged.

When Louie arrived at festival the morning of the 21st, he, CNN and everyone else discovered that TIFF had also suddenly changed the photo rules. Citing the “privacy rights” of the building owner, no one was allowed to shoot Louie on the “green carpet” entryway (where the glitzy star walk pics are always shot). Nor under the huge TIFF entry sign. Louie and party where then hustled to a sealed off upstairs lounge until the post-showing Q&A for their “protection and privacy”.

It wasn’t the warmest reception. On the other hand, the early threats regarding Louie’s airport arrest, rightist disruptions, and last minute TIFF cancellations proved to be hollow bravado. Everyone was just relieved the event was going through at all.

Inside the “sold out” theater TIFF had miraculously discovered a row of empty seats that was now filled with Taiji officials, including Mayor Sangen, the fisherman nicknamed “Private Space” and several Fishery Agency bureaucrats. When the film ended and audience broke into applause, Mayor Sangen and his entourage trooped out scowling before Louie appeared and the Q&A began.

Louie spoke for a few minutes explaining his motivations and hopes for the film. He admitting to nervousness at standing for the first time before a quintessentially “non-chorus” crowd and handled the expected “traditional food culture” questions deftly by noting his mother was older than this particular dolphin-killing “tradition”. Louie also responded thoughtfully to queries over why the film seemed to veer from an animal rights appeal to a mercury focused public health alarm.

Louie recounted the internal evolution of a classic documentary that follows a developing story rather than imposing predetermined script lines of its own. He recalled his own wake up call at a sushi dinner with some Minamata doctors who refused to eat any of the larger, more expensive fish.

When asked why, the doctors said they had tried a fish eating experiment on themselves to test mercury accumulation. They found that eating 200 grams of small fish per day doubled their mercury levels in a month, but that the same amount of larger fish increased their own mercury blood toxicity by eight times in the same span of time. This led Louie to test his own levels as well as those of his fisherman son. Both went through the roof, awakening him quite personally to the mercury menace in our seas and widening his appreciation of the risks of our fossil-fueled (and mercury intensive) energy economy.

The entire session was quite gratifying with complimentary comments far out-numbering the critiques. It ended with another round of appreciative applause, primarily for Louie but also for Ms. Tamako Takamatsu, the incredibly talented translator the Earth Island Institute advance team had hired, since the TIFF refused to offer a customary Q&A interpreter of its own.

“Komatsu, who wrote the definitive book on the Japanese defense of whaling had his head between his knees and was frantically rubbing his temples as if trying to poltergeist a migraine. If everybody else around him wasn’t in shock, I think they would have gotten him a doctor. ”

Louie and crew then trucked down to a press conference organized by the advance team in a trendy nearby club. The briefing was attended by about 45 Japanese and foreign media representatives, as well as 40 people from local activist groups. It was moderated by the London Time’s distinguished Asian editor, Richard Lloyd Parry, who actually appears briefly in The Cove getting hit over the head with a sign by an irate Taiji fisherman.

The questioning was more intensive but followed a similar course as the movie Q&A, except for the great interest in Louie’s surprising offer to donate all OPS Japanese profits from the film to Taiji fishermen. Promised if and when they renounce the drive kills and turn to other catch.

Though some of the Japanese press comments were fairly critical of the movie’s alleged cultural chauvinism, e.g. condemning dolphin fishing but not wholesale factory farmed cow and pig slaughter, Louie said he did not condone such practices either. They were outside the purview of his film. He made an impassioned defense of his Ocean Preservation Society’s focus on the critical state of the seas. Citing the catastrophic decline of ocean life and health globally and need for activism on every front, Louie pointed to the dolphin tragedy as a symbolic and motivating issue rather than the be all end all of the film.

Properly understood, he said, The Cove is actually “a love letter to the Japanese people” – a sincere effort to seduce them into a greater planetary love affair that would radically improve our world and protect their children, too.

The 90-minute briefing ended convivially with appreciative statements from most participants, except perhaps from Mr. Masayuki Komatsu, the notorious Fishing Agency spokesman who monitored the meeting. Mr Komatsu, who had once famously declared that minke whales were “the cockroaches of the sea”, simply stared at the floor, rubbed his temples and frowning a lot. He left without comment at the end.

Louie followed this run with several more exhausting hours of one-on-one interviews with major domestic and international media outlets. The long effort paid off handsomely. Over 800 stories were published on Google News the following day, not to mention the scores of stories and TV clips running in the Japanese media that completely overshadowed all other TIFF news for the week.

Indeed from the Associated Press’s first story on the 2009 TIFF opening, that was half about The Cove to the torrent of Cove coverage that continued through the week, it is obvious the TIFF executives knew exactly what they were doing when they tried to preemptively ban the film. They understand color and know a bloody rain of dolphin tears can always grey out and overshadow a faux ‘eco-green’ parade. This year’s festival was themed as being “for the environment”.

Louie flew out the next morn for the German and UK openings. He expressed his deepest gratitude to the EII advance team which had organized all his events, and leveraged The Cove’s 9/25 Tokyo Foreign Correspondents Club showing into a potent media network, which made TIFF’s attempted news blackout a bit of a farce.

Asian Cove distributor, Carl Clifton of the Works Media Group stayed behind in Tokyo to try and leverage the sudden notoriety into theater distribution on the ground. Talks are still in progress.

Report: David Kubiak

http://www.earthisland.org/immp – http://www.DolphinSafe.org – http://www.SaveJapanDolphins.org

1 Comment

1. admin   |  土曜日, 24 10月 2009 at 6:19 pm

   Responding to a potentially racial aspect to a primarily Western assault on their whaling and dolphin hunting industries within Japan, critical Japanese have admitted that it is really only vegans who can criticize their nation over such activities. It is only vegans, not meat and fish eaters of any other sort who can have a clear conscience and exercise a sense of integrity over these issues.

   Without doubt much of the popular criticism of Japan, due to the whaling and dolphin hunting industries, has drawn upon and expressed politically charged racial prejudices and stereotypes engendered in the past.

   Stereotypes which never applied to the majority of Japanese people and apply even less so now.