>>PREVIEW
SHARKWATER
DIRECTED BY Rob Stewart
Opens Friday, March 23
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It might seem that filmmaker Rob Stewart has set himself an impossible task in trying to rehabilitate the image of the ocean’s most perfectly designed predator. Sharks, after all, don’t have cute and cuddly on their side, and their popular characterization as man-eating leviathans has cultivated self-declared shark hunters who believe they are keeping the oceans safe for mankind. However, in Sharkwater, a documentary five years in the making, Stewart has been able to make the shark a sympathetic, even beautiful subject, chronicling the 400-million-year-old predator’s natural grace and the human forces that have decimated the world’s shark population by 90 per cent.
The 27-year-old photographer-turned-filmmaker’s obsession with sharks began at an early age, spending vacations in Florida and the Bahamas where he received his diving and photography equipment in exchange for leaving his parents alone. By 18, he was a commercial wildlife photographer, working summers while studying biology at the University of Western Ontario. But it was in 2002, says Stewart, that "the world coalesced to make (Sharkwater) possible."
On a trip to the Galapagos Islands, Stewart decided to make his first filmmaking attempt recording frigate birds mating. While the resulting footage wasn’t very satisfying, at sea the vessel encountered a boat illegally using a fishing line baited with hundreds of hooks, a technique known as "long-line fishing." Because the lines don’t differentiate between desired catches and other wildlife, the image Stewart catches in the opening moments of his film is nothing short of a mass slaughter, with a host of shark carcasses completely abandoned by the fleeing fishing boat.
Along with other crew members, Stewart began to cut the lines free. Hanging over the vessel’s side, Stewart recalls handing his camera to a 14-year-old boy with his family, telling him "to film everything," in what would become the first scene of Stewart’s nascent film. From these images of needlessly slaughtered sharks, Stewart set out to make what he hoped would be a nature documentary chronicling the natural beauty of the shark.
"When I started making the film I had a very different view of what it would end up becoming. I thought I was making an underwater Winged Migration," he says.
Instead, Sharkwater quickly turned into a documentary less concerned with the shark’s inherent grace, and more with the growing shark fin industry heavily contributing to reckless overfishing. With escalating confrontations between Stewart, his team and local authorities and fishermen, the documentary’s focus shifted from the ocean to the boats and people above it.
Shortly after joining Paul Watson of Sea Shepherd, a radical ecological group whose methods occasionally involve sinking vessels, Stewart encountered a fishing boat illegally sawing the fins from sharks, then tossing the remaining carcasses overboard – a technique known as "finning." Following an advisement from Guatemalan authorities to escort the fishing vessel to shore, the Ocean Warrior, Sea Shepherd’s flagship, eventually collided with the smaller fishing boat under the spray of Sea Shepherd’s water cannons, forcing the fishing crew to allow their vessel to be towed.
En route to the Guatemalan shore, however, Sea Shepherd received word that a Guatemalan gunship was inbound, tasked with arresting the Ocean Warrior’s crew. It was a sudden change in fortune that both Sea Shepherd and Stewart agreed was a direct result of the strong political pull of local Taiwanese business interests, illegal exporters of shark fins.
Despite the seeming invincibility of sharks, increasing demand for shark fins that were previously the exclusive delicacy of the wealthy has pressured previously protected reserves to ease restrictions on fishing. The result, as Sharkwater points out in graphic detail, is devastating.
"Sharks are quite susceptible to overfishing," says Stewart. "They have long gestation periods and even then have only a couple of babies and only every few years. So when trawl netters and other methods do pull up sharks, there’s a consequence."
"But, he adds, "there’s nothing stronger than a middle class all wanting to consume shark fin."
Ironically, the demand for sharks as food products is not limited to the high-end connotations of shark fin soup in China. In other countries, including Britain, other species of sharks are eaten such as spiny dog fish, popular in fish and chips. In fact, many shark meats are labelled euphemistically with names like "ling eel" or "flake."
As is the case in many unsustainable industries, however, blaming the fishermen who bear the brunt of Sea Shepherd’s crusade is problematic at best. Though Sharkwater is full of images illustrating the brutality of finning, Stewart is cognizant it is growing, unchecked demand in Taiwan and even first-world nations that is the root of the problem.
"It’s not (the fishermen) going in cutting shark fins so they can decorate their houses with it," he notes. "They’re not trading stocks on satellite phones. It’s middlemen making the money. Out of sight and out of mind, consumers don’t think about the consequences of acquiring them."
Despite this fact, Stewart maintains that Sea Shepherd’s aggressive methods have a place in the larger conservation movement. With sustainability still a distant dream, he says, conservationists need a host of options.
"As much as (Watson’s) tactics may seem unorthodox, it’s an enormous industry and just that alone is difficult to combat," says Stewart. "Just trying to make a movie is difficult, so when you can imagine a conservationist trying to stop it, you just need every tactic you can deploy."
Originally titled Fallen Gods – an allusion to the decline of one of Earth’s oldest species that Alliance-Atlantis felt wouldn’t be commercially viable – Stewart’s film is an intriguing mix of documentary and exposé , contrasting the film’s high definition underwater sequences with the candid and sometimes clandestine looks at the physical realities of the shark fin industry. For Stewart, who sees the continued health of ocean species as integral to our own, it’s a perfect medium for illustrating the decline of ancient predators of striking beauty, all in a form meant to appeal to an audience large enough to eventually take much-needed action.
"I think one of the things I try to do with the movie, and one of the things I think is so important, is that conservation has to be cool," he says. "It has to be thought about and remain on the forefront just about everywhere.
"It should be taught before Shakespeare and calculus," he adds. "There’s little more important than the survival of the human species." |
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