The Cove (2009)

Taiji is a little town in Japan with a big and bad secret, says renegade activist Ric O'Barry. Taiji is the world's largest supplier of dolphins, and a secret cove there is the site of an unimaginable dolphin carnage year after year. A live dolphin for an amusement park can fetch $150,000; the dead dolphins are marketed as "whale" meat despite their high levels of mercury poisoning. Watch this film and, if you can bear to watch, you'll see Taiji's cove turn bloody red. O'Barry knows what he's talking about. When he captured and trained the five dolphins who played Flipper in 1964, he became the world's most famous dolphin trainer. About ten years later when one of those dolphins died in his arms, he had a change of heart and devoted the next thirty-five years to protecting dolphins. This documentary shows how a team that O'Barry assembled went to extraordinary lengths to go deep undercover and record the slaughter with hydrophones and cameras (both thermal and underwater). Going to Seaworld will never be the same, nor should it. The Cove was nominated for an Academy Award as best documentary film.