A Whale of a Tale

影片介紹 FILM INFO

Megumi Sasaki / 2016 / USA, Japan / 96min / Japanese, English / English and Chinese subtitles / Taiwan premier

The small Japanese fishing town of Taiji was made famous in 2010 by The Cove, an Oscar-winning documentary that showed how locals slaughtered dolphins in an annual roundup. Almost overnight, the town morphed into an international battleground for eco-activists. Five years later, filmmaker Megumi Sasaki, the New York-based, award-winning director of Herb and Dorothy, revisits the Taiji to take another view. She finds Sea Shepherd activists still there, still yelling insults, but now on a first-name basis with the fishermen. The detente in this eco-war is often comical, but Sasaki’s larger goal is to critique of The Cove, a film structured like a Hollywood thriller but often disingenuous. In this entertaining, daily life portrait of Taiji, she shows a clash between globalism and localism. She also discovers that Taiji is changing.