Resident Orca: Doc on Whale in Captivity Both a Blow and a Balm to the Soul
By Kim Hughes
Rating: B
The 2024 documentary Resident Orca, screening Saturday (April 12, 3 pm) at Toronto’s Hot Docs cinema before airing Canada-wide via Crave starting on Earth Day April 22, is a searing reminder, if one was needed, of human beings’ boundless capacity for cruelty toward animals.
It is also a reminder of people’s capacity for good, once they set their priorities straight.
The film follows an ad hoc group — a pair of Indigenous women, a rich philanthropist, a TV reporter, a former animal trainer, a whale expert — united by a singular mission.
They want to return an orca dubbed Lolita, known colloquially as Toki, to the open waters of the Salish Sea where her relatives have dwelled “since time immemorial” but where, five decades earlier, she was brutally seized and shipped to an aquarium in Miami to leap and swim for the benefit of paying audiences.
The horrors of amusement park life for land and sea creatures have been well-documented in recent years. Yet Resident Orca is especially distressing as it chronicles, through archival footage, the scoop of some 50 orcas, many calves being torn from their screaming, helpless mothers, from waters in the Pacific Northwest during the 1960s and 70s.
Like Toki, those whales were indiscriminately sent off to populate marine parks around the world. Unlike Toki, all have since died. All these years later, Toki — whose mother is apparently still alive in the wild — continues to swim in circles in a tiny concrete tank that offers neither shade from the scorching Florida sun nor other plant or animal life to engage with.
For Tah-Mahs Ellie Kinley and Squil-le-he-le Raynell Morris, members of Washington’s Lummi First Nation and executive producers of the documentary, freeing Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut, as Toki is known to them, is more than just an act of animal liberation or advocacy on behalf of a criminally endangered species. It’s a familial imperative.
The women regard the whales that swim in waters by their ancestral land as kin. To them, Toki’s capture and confinement, and the Miami Seaquarium’s attempts to tame her, is analogous to residential schools, where Indigenous children were sent to be “civilized” to norms better reflecting their colonial overlords. Comparing the stewardship offered to the orcas by the gentle, spiritual Lummi people to that of their profit-motivated captors, it’s hard to disagree.
Resident Orca follows the slowly expanding support group as they ramp up efforts to return Toki to the wild. It’s an assignment which draws significant attention, first from Pritam Singh, the very wealthy environmental activist and chairman of conservation society Sea Shepherd — who offers $1 million to free Toki from Miami Seaquarium — to the even wealthier Jim Irsay, owner of the Indianapolis Colts NFL team, who offers millions more to transport Toki out of Miami permanently.
Other players factor impactfully. Miami TV journalist Louis Aguirre tries, against considerable obstacles planted by the Seaquarium’s initial owners, to report on the animal’s physical and mental well-being as efforts to free her continue apace.
Whale expert Charles Vinick, meanwhile, knows firsthand the fraught nature of returning a long-captive whale to the wild, referencing the famous Free Willy whale Keiko, returned to the North Atlantic in 2002 some 25 years after he was snatched for marine park servitude. Keiko died the next year.
Sanctuaries, then, may provide a better option for Toki and others like her. If only the group and the Seaquarium’s comparatively progressive new owners, The Dolphin Company, can keep her alive.
Interestingly, Resident Orca had its world premiere at the Miami Film Festival last year, suggesting the city and its leaders acknowledge errors made, with hopes to atone.
Anyone who sees the film, witnessing the recognized intellectual and emotional capacities of these magnificent mammals, can’t help but be moved by co-writer/directors Sarah Sharkey Pearce and Simon Schneider’s at-once maddening, inspirational, and ultimately, heartbreaking film.
Wads of Kleenex recommended.
Resident Orca. Written and directed by Sarah Sharkey Pearce and Simon Schneider. With Tah-Mahs Ellie Kinley, Squil-le-he-le Raynell Morris, Pritam Singh, Louis Aguirre and Charles Vinick. At Toronto’s Hot Docs April 12, 3 pm, featuring a post-screening Q&A with director Sarah Sharkey Pearce, and airing on Crave beginning April 22.