Original-Cin Interview: Nadine Pequeneza on Last of the Right Whales and Filming Death in the Water
By Jim Slotek
A harrowing, indeed shocking, film climax is something you’d expect from a scripted thriller rather than a documentary on right whales.
But the penultimate scene in Nadine Pequeneza’s Last of the Right Whales already has audiences talking, ahead of its Canada-wide release in theatres on World Whale Day Sunday.
Off the Gulf of St. Lawrence, a young right whale has just become entangled from head to fluke by a commercial fishing line. A creature the size of a house flails about violently, cutting itself in its effort to get free. Eventually, the water around it is red with blood.
“With audiences who’ve seen it so far, the reaction to that footage is pretty traumatic,”says Pequeneza, who plans on taking part in an “Impact Campaign,” with appearances at screenings over the next several months.
“One thing you could say is that’s never been witnessed before, to see a fresh entanglement. And we know it was a fresh entanglement because the scientists photographed that young male four hours earlier, gear free. So, the violence of it is really astounding.” Numbering mere hundreds worldwide, right whales are in some ways a less glamourous species than cousins like the humpback or the grey whale. The reason being that they are harder to film.
“As I became more involved in making this film happen, trying to get those federal permits, trying to get access, I realized why there are not many films about North American Right Whales,” says Pequeneza, who was motivated by headlines of the disastrous year 2017, when 17 right whales turned up dead, 12 of them in Canadian waters.
“It’s because it’s very difficult to do. There’s all these road blocks to filming them because they’re endangered. You can’t dive with right whales. Normally when you see a whale film, most of the footage is shot by divers under the water. And that’s not a possibility here.
“So, we had to rely on aerial photography, but also being there for certain behaviors when the whales spend a lot of time at the surface. When the calves are just born, they spend a lot of time at the surface. And in the case of, say, the skim feeding you see at Cape Cod bay, making sure we can get cameras to those moments.”
It’s hard to get funding for a documentary where you can’t promise anything. And Pequeneza admits funding agencies were dubious. “They doubted we would be able to get the footage. They’re very happy now,” she says with a laugh.
On and off the endangered list over generations, right whales (so called because they were once considered the ideal species to hunt during whaling days) were in larger numbers in 2005 when I took my sons to St. Andrews, N.B. for a whale-watching trip. They weren’t referred to as endangered at the time, but there were no promises we’d see one. But we did, a mountain of mammal rising from the Bay of Fundy.
In 2015, scientists started noticing a migration of right whales to the St. Lawrence, as climate change warmed the Bay of Fundy and plankton declined.. Today, Pequeneza says, about half of the entire population eventually ends up there to feed.
“It was a succession of headlines, it seemed like every other day,” she says of the 2017 die-off. “But how was I going to tell this story in a way that engages people? Because you can’t just have dead whales on a beach. That’s not going to bring people into this story. They have to come to know these animals.
“So, to me, getting those images was very important, but also connecting with the whales on an individual basis. That’s why we had whale characters like Snowcone and her calf that we followed over the course of two years. To get to know them really drives home the point of just how urgent this situation is.”
An issue-driven director, but not a single-issue one, Pequeneza’s doc subjects have ranged from Haiti (Inside Disaster: Haiti) to the U.S. criminal justice system’s incarceration of juveniles (15 to Life: Kenneth’s Story) to whales.
“I don’t really see them as that different,” she says of her disparate themes. “But if I had to look for an overarching theme, it’s really about systems and how we order our society and our lives. Whether it’s the criminal justice system or the medical system or the financial system (The Invisible Heart, about “social impact bonds”), it’s a broad spectrum of the type of systems we set up in our society to help the most vulnerable.
“I would say what distinguishes my work is that it’s not black and white. I really try to explore the greys, because I don’t think everything is cut and dry. It’s the nuance, the subtlety that really helps us to understand the world and our place in it.”
(Case in point: a key participant in Last of the Right Whales is Martin Noël, a New Brunswick crab fisherman, whose industry has caused collateral damage to whale populations, and who is looking to find sustainable ways to carry on with his living).
As problematic as the film itself was, Pequeneza devotes as much energy to the aftermath, promoting the message long after the last edit.
“It’s a huge amount of work to do these kind of campaigns, but it makes the work that much more fulfilling. To just do a film, release it, put it up on iTunes, let it be broadcast on television and walk away, well, that’s not why I make films.”
Last of the Right Whales. Written and directed by Nadine Pequeneza. Debuting across Canada this weekend to mark International Whale Day, Sunday March 20. CLICK HERE for a full schedule of screenings.