The Islands and the Whales

Description

Shot over four years among the small fishing communities of the Faroe Islands, an isolated Danish archipelago, Mike Day’s absorbing documentary tracks a period of uneasy transition, as the longtime hunting and fishing practices of the Faroese are threatened by disparate global pressures, from animal rights activism to plummeting wildlife populations to mercury crawling up the ocean food chain. A local toxicologist, wielding 30 years’ worth of data on the neurological effects—particularly on children—of ingesting a traditional diet of pilot whale and seabirds, struggles to deliver the bad news to his compatriots, among them a young father of three who’s reluctant to abandon the customs he’s inherited. Scenes of local men herding pilot whales into the shallows for the kill or rappelling down a cliff to raid a gannet nesting area are viscerally affecting and graphic; Day presents these moments unflinchingly, as if to recommend that viewers come to terms with the loss of life, so they can put it into context with the loss of a way of life, one in which urgent contemporary concerns are interwoven with older folk practices amid a landscape of eerie, monumental beauty. —Lynn Rapoport

Trailer

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Film Details