Documentaries have been in the limelight lately. Filmmakers have been trying to draw our attention to events currently occuring in nature, to our lifestyle, and yes, to global warming. While such documentaries as An Inconvenient Truth, Sicko, Supersize Me and others have gotten their share of attention, there is one little film with a big message that we also ought to see.

- - -

- - -

It's called Sharkwater and it’s the baby project of Canadian filmmaker Rob Stewart. This man almost lost a leg trying to make this film ( not from a shark bite of course, but from contracting a flesh-eating disease as a result of spending too much time under water) and was once forced to run for his life when unscrupulous members of a crime syndicate tried to capture him. He's good-looking too -- in a celebrity kinda way! In fact, the press coined the name ‘shark stud’ to describe Stewart. That may sound amusing to some, but when we see how he did it, there is really no reason to make fun of the guy. Stewart knows the power of the media and getting much-needed publicity for his film, so he’s even game to ride out the media attention.

And yes, the movie IS about sharks and how people’s perceptions of this animal could eventually lead to its extinction.

More about Sharkwater:

For filmmaker Rob Stewart, exploring sharks began as an underwater adventure but soon turned into a beautiful and dangerous journey into the meaning of balance of life on earth. Driven by passion fed with a life-long fascination with sharks, Stewart debunks both historical stereotypes and media misrepresentations of sharks as bloodthirsty, man-eating monsters and reveals the reality of sharks as pillars in the evolution of life in the ocean.

Filmed in visually stunning, high definition video, Sharkwater takes you into the most shark-rich waters of the world, exposing the exploitation and corruption surrounding the world’s shark populations in the marine reserves of Cocos Island, Costa Rica and the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador.

- - -

- - -

The movie tells the story of how Stewart teams up with renegade conservationist Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society in an effort to protect sharks. Their unbelievable adventure begins with a battle between the Sea Shepherds and the shark poachers in Guatemala, resulting in pirate boat rammings, gunboat chases, mafia espionage, corrupt court systems and attempted murder charges, forcing them to flee for their lives.

Through it all, Stewart discovers how these magnificent creatures have gone from predator to prey, and learns that despite surviving the earth’s history of mass extinctions, they could easily be wiped out within a few years due to human greed. Stewart’s remarkable journey of courage and determination moves from being a mission to save the world’s sharks into being a fight for his life, and that of humankind.

Tell us about the first time you saw a shark.

I was a kid. I was free-diving with just a mask and a snorkel. I'd wanted to see a shark my whole life. I had read about them in books. I’d watched them on television and I thought they were the coolest animals on earth. As I swam around the corner of a reef, I saw a shark. I was just amazed because it was so cool to see something so big and so powerful and so perfect.

Why save sharks? What makes them so important?

Species evolving in the oceans over the last 400 million years have been shaped by their predators, the sharks, giving rise to schooling behavior, camouflage, speed, size and communication. They have survived five major extinctions and now they are being fished out. Many countries have no sharks left because they are being illegally harvested for their fins and poachers are now fishing sharks from other countries, countries that depend on sharks for food. But no one wants to save sharks, people are afraid of them.

Do specials proclaiming it the “summer of the shark” because of attacks and the JAWS perception upset you?

It really pisses me off. You understand where they’re coming from because a dangerous shark makes money and sells papers. If they tell you a shark is beautiful and perfect and wonderful and won’t attack you that’s only going to make news once. But if they tell you “Shark attack. Shark attack,” that’s news every time. It’s ridiculous, but you know they are doing it just to play off people’s fears. The reality is totally different. Half the time it is a small shark that accidentally bites someone’s foot. You could have gotten the same injury from stepping on a piece of glass. It’s crazy how the media approaches it and how they’ve given sharks such a bad rap. It’s ludicrous because so few people actually get bitten.

When did you begin thinking about making a documentary?

I was working as a wildlife photographer and I had done a bunch of different articles in some really big magazines on what was happening to sharks around the world after I discovered illegal shark fishing in the Galapagos. We set up a little fund where people reading the articles could donate money towards a patrol boat in the Galapagos islands. We received virtually no money. I realized there had to be a better way to reach people. Print clearly wasn’t the most powerful medium I could be using. And then I figured “Ok, what if I make a movie about it?” I had never used a video camera before. I just sort of decided I was going to make a movie. I found some people who would loan me some money to rent some cameras and I got started.

Tell us about shooting the film.

The movie’s gone in every different direction imaginable. When we started, I knew
nothing about movies or how to shoot them. So I started just thinking about making a beautiful underwater movie about sharks. And then, when I was on this trip with the Sea Shepherd organization with world-renowned conservationist Paul Watson, everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. We collided with a shark-fishing boat in Guatemala that was chasing us out of Costa Rica. I never got into the water the first month there. So my underwater documentary dreams were vastly diminished. Then I sort of decided this was a really cool story, and decided to film everything that was going on.

Tell us about shark-finning.

Sharks are caught for their fins. Poachers cut off the fins and dump the bodies
overboard. The fins are sold for shark fin soup and though many countries have banned shark-finning, millions of sharks are illegally harvested each year. When we arrived in Costa Rica, the crew of the Sea Shepherd was arrested for attempted murder for the crash, despite the fact the president of the country had invited us there. Everyone else involved was wondering why the whole judicial system was attacking us. While ashore, we had a chance to find out more about the shark-finning operations. Shark-finning is illegal in Costa Rica but shark fins that came from Costa Rica were showing up all over Asia. We figured there had to be some deeper meaning to all of this. We met someone who believed there was a connection between the Taiwanese mafia and all the shark fins turning up in Asia. We started checking it out and this guy had a few places where he knew we would find fins. We started investigating and there were fins everywhere. There were miles of fin operations with thousands of fins drying on rooftops, people bringing in fins. We quickly figured out there was an enormous amount of money coming into the country and there was this whole underground multi-billion dollar industry.

Were you nervous?

Absolutely. We ran at some point. The operators came at us with guns. And we had to run. I wish we could have stayed. I wish I'd had the balls to stay, to keep filming. We had to hop in cars and leave. Our guide later told us the shark-fin “mafia” was on the lookout for us and it would not be a good idea to walk around town.

You also caught the flesh-eating disease?

Exactly how I got that I’m not sure. I had cuts all over my feet and something must have gotten in and infected my lymphatic system. The only way I knew I had it was because my lymph glands were swollen. I went to hospital a few times in the Galapagos and they just gave me anti-inflammatories. A few days later I went to a doctor who spoke a tiny bit of English who looked at my leg. He took blood tests and said: "You’re staying here. You may lose your leg."

Was there any point during the filming when you thought about throwing in the towel?

This was close. This was the ultimate low. Everything had gone wrong. We’d been kicked out of virtually all the countries we had been to. I would have been arrested if I went back to Costa Rica, and at the end of all this, I had not shot anything underwater. I had come to shoot an underwater documentary and instead had shot all this human drama. And now I was possibly going to lose my leg. The situation sucked and I had a girlfriend in Toronto going crazy and my parents were wondering what was going on and I couldn’t tell everybody what exactly was happening cause it would only make it worse for me. The only thing I could do in the situation was laugh about it. I also made the decision that I hadn’t made the movie I wanted to make yet, and I hadn't gotten back underwater with the sharks yet either. So much was left to be done. It would have been crazy to give up at that point. So I stayed there [in hospital] for a week and eventually the infection cleared up and off I went again.

What are you ultimately hoping people will take away from your film?

There are a few things. The simplest one is that people view sharks differently.
They’re not dangerous. They’re not mindless killers. They don’t eat people and I think, as long as people view them as dangerous predators, people aren’t going to care about them. They’re not going to want them to survive on the planet. They want to get rid of something they’re afraid of. I hope that it helps to start reversing the way the media has portrayed sharks and gives people information and the tools they need to make better decisions to be able to say “Okay, I’m not going to be afraid of that” or “I’m not going to listen to this headline.” For humans to survive on this planet, having such an irrational fear of sharks is not a good thing.

The other thing is that we’ve been in this few thousand-year trend of destruction.
It hasn’t been cool to conserve, to promote sustainable use of the environment, of the oceans. But I think people are going to start realizing that if we're going to survive on this planet as a species, we need to conserve it and protect it.

[ Visit the official Sharkwater site ]

Set as favorite

Bookmark

Email This

Hits: 296

Comments (0)

Write comment

Name

Email

Website

Title

Comment

smaller | bigger

Subscribe via email (Registered users only)

Add Comment Preview