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The Salem Film Fest Selection Committee recently got good news when one of the films already selected for the festival was nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Feature Documentary category.
“The Cove” will screen at the Salem Film Fest on Monday, March 1, at 7:30 pm, six days before the Oscar ceremonies on Sunday, March 7.
“We loved the film, so it’s gratifying that the Academy concurs. Fortunately, the festival is timed perfectly to give it a good showcase before the awards are announced,” comment Paul Van Ness, one of the festival founders.
The nominated documentary is a riveting environmental suspense drama about dolphins. In the 1960s, Richard O’Barry enjoyed a lucrative career as a specialized animal trainer; he captured the five dolphins that were used in the popular television series Flipper, and taught them the tricks and special commands they used on the show.
Four decades later, O’Barry has renounced his former life as a trainer and become an animal rights activist, speaking out against the hunting of aquatic mammals and keeping them in captivity. O’Barry is not welcome in Taiji, a town along the Japanese coast where hunting dolphins is a major part of the local economy, but he and a group of activist filmmakers made their way into the city as well as the carefully guarded harbor in hopes of documenting the abuse of dolphins by fisherman and the poisoning of the waters that has taken a toll on the marine ecology.
O’Barry and his colleagues captured some beautiful underwater footage as well as shocking images of how the town’s fisherman have sullied the dolphins and their habitat, and director Louie Psihoyos has used this material as the basis for the documentary The Cove, which received its world premiere at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.
The film is one of 34 documentaries which will be screened during the seven-day film festival, entering it’s third year, which has grown to be the largest all-documentary festival in New England. The 2010 fest will feature live appearances by 14 visiting filmmakers, who will conduct Q&A discussions after their film’s screenings.
