Luna the young orca whale, in a new film

Movie glows with Luna's spirit

Filmmakers hold out hope for other whales

Eric Volmers, Calgary Herald

Published: Thursday, February 12, 2009

Preview

Director Suzanne Chisholm will appear for a Q&A after both screenings of Saving Luna Friday evening at the Globe Theatre

Those who doubt the mystifying powers that a young orca named Luna could have on people need only look at the strange trajectory his story took under the watchful eye of veteran journalists Suzanne Chisholm and Michael Parfit.

The British Columbia reporters-filmmakers behind the film Saving Luna first went to cover the plight of the curiously friendly whale in B. C's Nootka Sound for a magazine article,

only to find they had too much material to fit into that format. The article became a longer article, which was eventually parlayed into a book deal. Then the CBC offered funding to turn it into a hour-long documentary, before Chisholm and Parfit finally decided to turn the heartwarming and heart-wrenching story of Luna into a feature-length film.

But perhaps most telling was their decision to abandon objectivity during filming and become activists for the whale, which had become the focus of heated battles between the government, First Nations, local citizens and fishermen.

"That was a hard one to get to," admits Chisholm. "We're journalists. Mike has written for over 30 years and never gotten involved in a story. But we saw that the policy the government had on Luna wasn't working, based on a hell of a lot of evidence from being out in the field."

"It came from the unique situation of seeing what was happening with the government and the people, and realizing that the people couldn't keep away from Luna and, more importantly, couldn't keep Luna away from people," says Chisholm.

The moment comes after the half-way mark of the 90-minute film, when Parfit decides to ignore demands from Department of Fisheries and Oceans officials to avoid Luna and begins to interact with the whale.

This, of course, doesn't come out of the blue.

Luna's ordeal had been dutifully covered by the media for three years, showing his estrangement from his pod and subsequent childlike desperation to initiate contact with humans as a surrogate family. The DFO told people to ignore him. The First Nations revered him, believing Luna to be a reincarnated chief. Townspeople and schoolchildren fell in love with him and bad-tempered fishermen were soon wishing him dead. But when an attempt to capture and relocate Luna failed, it became clear to Chisholm and Parfit that no one had a coherent plan in place to save him.

"He would have been better off with his family, that's not in dispute, if he was taken really, really early on," says Chisholm. "But that didn't happen. After the failed attempt to capture him, it became clear there wasn't the will or money to move him. So we thought he needed to be given the controlled interaction that he needs. It wasn't the same as living with other whales, humans aren't the same. But it could have been a foster pod."

Saving Luna brings with it greater issues about how humans interact with nature and how we could better share this world with other creatures. But for all the green issues the film brings into focus, the universal appeal of Saving Luna undeniably springs from the endearing character of the young Orca.

The film has become a crowd-favourite throughout the world, despite its soul-crushingly sad ending. It has won dozens of awards at festivals and found a particularly receptive audience in children.

"I'm convinced it's Luna," saysChisholm. "I'd love to say it's the filmmakers, but really it's the amazing creature and character. The Luna story has all the plot twists of a Hollywood film."

Chisholm and Parfit are no strangers to making films or writing stories about our relationship to nature. They have produced and directed more than 20 projects for the National Geographic Channel, tackling everything from melting ice in Greenland, to the Inuit of Nunavut, to puffins, to the rising sea levels in the Netherlands.

While Saving Luna's story may be unique, the underlying theme is not, Chisholm says. "I think we share the planet with other creatures and we have to get along, that's not optional," she says. "When Luna became slightly inconvenient there was this idea by some that he should be killed or sent off to an aquarium. We like to hold out hope that there's more options for these guys. But it's not really a message film. People can leave the film with different ideas of what the message is. We were just telling a story."