A pow­er­ful new film defends the prac­tice of whaling

“In the North Atlantic Ocean between Ice­land and Scot­land lie the Faroe Islands. Home to 48,000 descen­dants of vikings, this small nation has always relied on the seas for its liveli­hood.” After these intro­duc­to­ry lines, Mike Day’s doc­u­men­tary cuts to stun­ning panoram­ic shots of the remote Faroe Islands, then to sea waters run­ning red with whale blood in the after­math of the one of the Faroese’ old­est tra­di­tions – the whale hunt. Silent of com­men­tary, these images, as those through­out his film, are pre­sent­ed with­out judge­ment but left to speak for themselves.

Direc­tor Day first heard of the Islanders’ whal­ing prac­tices as many oth­ers had – cam­paign emails cir­cu­lat­ing the media-fed scan­dal of whales being slaugh­tered for sport or rite of pas­sage on a far­away island, a bar­bar­i­ty from a back­ward peo­ple that ought to be stopped. Through 53 weeks of shoot­ing over four years, Day sought to uncov­er the true sto­ry behind the head­lines. Gain­ing insight was not eas­i­ly won:

“We drank a lot of schnapps with them,” Day explains with a smile. ​“And got to know them. We went on the hunt, we went down the cliffs with ropes wrapped around our waists in the mid­dle of the night, spent hours on ledges while they hunt­ed for the seabirds.” Through painstak­ing patience and tenac­i­ty, includ­ing falling halfway down a cliff film­ing the seabird hunts (“I think we earned our stripes that day”), Day and his team were able to gain the trust of the com­mu­ni­ty. And demon­strate their agen­da was not that of activists that had gone before them – almost com­i­cal­ly brought to life by the arrival of Pamela Ander­son on an expen­sive speed­boat to make a woe­ful­ly mis­placed protest – but rather present their real­i­ty in all its detail and nuance.

“I think there’s an easy hypocrisy to come to sto­ries in far away places with a very pre­con­cep­tive view of it,” the direc­tor told me. ​“I mean we kill so many ani­mals. We don’t see the blood, it goes out a pipeline in an abat­toir. So unless you’re veg­an, you’re involved in the blood and the slaugh­ter of ani­mals. There, they are putting the meat on the table with their own hands and they’re much more con­nect­ed to the process. There’s con­nec­tion we don’t have with nature.”

In par­tic­u­lar, being able to cap­ture the whale hunt itself in vivid detail, from the rush of the whole com­mu­ni­ty onto the beach­es, to spears plung­ing, tails thrash­ing, faces being splat­tered with blood, chunks of whale meat being cart­ed off in wheel­bar­rows, was a priv­i­lege not pre­vi­ous­ly grant­ed: ​“On that hunt, well no for­eign­er had ever been allowed on it before. So to be able to see it is one thing, but to able to cap­ture it on film was real­ly a hum­bling experience.”

The result is a fas­ci­nat­ing piece of cin­e­ma, tak­ing the view­er on a jour­ney Day him­self expe­ri­enced to under­stand the way of life of this unique com­mu­ni­ty from its epic land­scapes to inti­mate famil­ial moments around the din­ner table, in a set­ting the direc­tor describes as a ​“cin­e­mat­ic micro­cosm” but where the front­line sto­ry is its people.

And we dis­cov­er, as he did, that heart of the mat­ter is less the slaugh­ter of ani­mals we con­sid­er should be pro­tect­ed but rather that human activ­i­ty has so heav­i­ly pol­lut­ed the oceans that pilot whale meat has become tox­ic for the Faroese to eat, with the life-long research of Pro­fes­sor Pal Wei­he show­ing dan­ger­ous lev­els of mer­cury caus­ing dam­ag­ing effects on the brain: ​“It’s real­ly a tale about them com­ing to terms with the envi­ron­men­tal dam­age that we’ve done and hav­ing to rec­on­cile their old tra­di­tion­al ways of life with mod­ern life that they now lead,” Day reflects.

“They’re not going to stop killing the whales more than we’re going to stop killing pigs because some­one from the Mid­dle East thinks we shouldn’t eat pigs. Noth­ing was going to hap­pen with that approach in my opin­ion. I want­ed to look at the big­ger sto­ry that real­ly should unite both sides and actu­al­ly has. Anti-whal­ing organ­i­sa­tions and whalers alike should all be cam­paign­ing for these seas to be clean­er, the tox­i­c­i­ty of the whales should be some­thing that dis­turbs us all. Because it’s not just the whales, it’s every­thing in the sea that’s being pol­lut­ed by us, by burn­ing coal, by gold min­ing. Total­ly unnec­es­sary things.”

Echo­ing the documentary’s recur­ring ref­er­ences to the Hul­du­folk, Farose myth­i­cal peo­ple who would warn the com­mu­ni­ty to stay in equi­lib­ri­um with nature, the film is less a spot­light on a tra­di­tion, but an exquis­ite­ly-wrought warn­ing to the world of the dev­as­tat­ing impact of human activ­i­ty: ​“It’s a trag­ic tale real­ly but one with a hap­py end­ing if peo­ple react and lis­ten to the mes­sages that were com­ing from the nat­ur­al world and from the islanders and from the whales.”