SIFF Part 4: “Saving Luna” and “Walt & El Grupo”

Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming. On Sunday we saw the 1:30 screening of “Saving Luna,” a Canadian documentary about a young orca who somehow became separated from his pod and mysteriously ended up in the remote waters of Nootka Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island, B.C.

I wanted to see this film, but I also kind of didn’t, because I knew I would end up crying through pretty much the whole thing. (“Do we need to bring a box of Kleenex to the screening?” David asked me. “And a mop,” I replied.) It’s a very sad story: An abandoned baby from an intensely social species, Luna had plenty of fish to eat in the Sound, but his craving for companionship was so great that he began seeking interaction with boats and people. This prompted an intense debate among the public, policymakers, and the local First Nations tribe, over whether an attempt should be made to reunite him with his pod, whether he should be left alone and prevented from interacting with humans, or whether he should be provided with structured human interaction through a program of stewardship. Many of the local residents became deeply attached to Luna and the strong bond this wild animal seemed to have with the human community; others found him a dangerous nuisance. After a couple of years of controversy, during which Luna grew bigger and began to cause damage to some boats in his attempts to play and have some human interaction, he ran afoul of a tugboat’s propeller one night and was killed.

There’s a lot more to this story than I’ve included here; for a very good summary, see this article from the Seattle Times. Although it did seem a bit heavy-handed and manipulative at times, “Saving Luna” was well worth seeing. The filmmakers, husband-and-wife team Suzanne Chisholm and Michael Parfit, are journalists who went to Nootka Sound to report on an attempt to capture Luna in 2004, and ended up staying for several years, going deeper into the story and ending up becoming advocates for the whale. The resulting film clearly shows the complexity of the situation and left this viewer with a lot of food for discussion. And a big pile of used Kleenex.

That evening at 6:30 we went to see “Walt & El Grupo,” coincidentally another documentary by a husband-and-wife team, Theodore Thomas and Kuniko Okubo. In 1941, the U.S. Government funded a goodwill tour of Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and Chile for Walt Disney and a group of his artists. (Director Theodore Thomas is actually the son of one of the artists who went on the tour.) “Walt & El Grupo” reconstructs the tour through archival photographs, films, sketches, and interviews.

What we didn’t realize until the first words appeared in the opening titles was that “Walt & El Grupo” was funded by the Walt Disney Family Foundation. As one might expect, the production values were very high and the film was very well put together. But the Disney company is famous for protecting its image, and we could sense the weighty hand of that control hovering over the entire film. As David put it, “Maybe we couldn’t expect this film to be very critical, but couldn’t it have been at least a little more curious?” So it’s hard to feel that we could trust much of anything we saw in this film. But, as I said, the movie was very well-made; the Latin music used throughout was wonderful, and I was captivated by the watercolors and sketches the artists made during the tour.

Next up: “In the Land of the Headhunters.”