Saving Luna
Director:Suzanne Chisholm, Michael Parfit
Supplier: Mountainside Films
Synopsis:SAVING LUNA began with an assignment from Smithsonian magazine to write a story about a curious conflict that was developing in Nootka Sound on the West Coast of Vancouver Island. A whale was trying to make friends with people, and the government was trying to prevent him from doing so.
My wife, Suzanne Chisholm, and I went to the village of Gold River in the spring of 2004 for three weeks. The short version of what happened then is this: like the thief who came to steal the money, we fell in love with the subject of our story, and didn’t leave.
The long version is more complicated than that. It involved a government effort to move Luna, a First Nations effort to prevent the move, and the long consequences for the whale after the initial conflict on the water ended with an uncertain outcome. You can see more about that stuff in the documentary itself.
As far as the making of the film itself goes, that became complicated, too. We eventually wound up actually participating in the events of the story we had come to cover, and that had a huge effect on how we came to make this film.
At first we participated in the story just as volunteers to help in a non-political way. I’m a pilot, so we flew several spotting missions over the Pacific outside the area where Luna was living to see if we could find his family, L-Pod, as it moved toward southern Vancouver Island from its winter travels. People hoped that if L-Pod could be found, Luna might be led to a reunion near Nootka Sound. No one saw L-Pod, because that year it passed south on the other side of the island.
Then, when the government effort to capture and move Luna began, so many restrictions were placed on the press that we believed that no independent members of the press would have the opportunity to watch the capture and subsequent move. We thought that independent observers were important, so Suzanne volunteered to serve as the official videographer for the Mowachaht/Muchalaht First Nation during the capture attempt. She was invited to do so, and the result was a film we put together for the Mowachaht/Muchalaht called “The Nine Days.”
At the same time, I watched the capture events from our 13-foot red Zodiac. I kept getting in trouble with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO), which had set up a 500-meter no-go zone around Luna to make it harder for the Mowachaht/Muchalaht to interfere with its capture attempt. The band paddled inside the zone and sang to Luna as part of its efforts to frustrate the capture, but I kept getting chased out of there by DFO, so I started jumping out on the bank near the action and watching from the rocks. Nobody could tell me I was interfering with Luna when I was standing on solid ground.
The paddlers in the canoe noticed this odd guy dashing along in a little boat and then jumping out, and they started calling me “Mink,” because mink tend to swim fast, then stand up on the bank looking around. It was not an enormously flattering nickname, but it stuck.
While all this was happening, we became more and more amazed by Luna himself. Orcas are born to socialize with others of their kind, but he didn’t have any others of his kind, and his creative way of trying to make a social life for himself out of a relationship with people was endearing. Like most of the science-oriented people who came to Gold River during this time, we believed strongly that people should not play with Luna because if he got too used to people he might not be able to make a smooth transition back to his pod, but his determination to befriend people was astonishing to see.
However, we eventually changed our minds about whether he should be given friendship. After the attempt to catch Luna, we got a book assignment to write about what had happened, and as we watched Luna, we saw that the effort to prevent him from having contact with people would never work. He kept trying to make friends, but the chaotic way his friendliness affected human activities along Nootka Sound led to threats to kill him and risks to him from boats. Eventually we took a huge step for journalists, and we decided to become involved in the politics of trying to help Luna survive. We took an active role in trying to protect Luna on the water, and we urged the government to adopt a program to actively give Luna consistent friendship, which could end the chaos and keep him and the public safe.
That’s where the title comes from. Many people like us were trying to save Luna, but in so many different ways and with so much disagreement, that it did not get done.
But that’s for the documentary – and the book – to tell. When we eventually got an agreement with CBC and then Telefilm Canada to make a full-length documentary, we had plenty of adventures just with the filming. For instance, Suzanne’s camera got splashed by a load of water from Luna’s tail and took about 30 seconds to expire in a gurgle and sizzle as the salt water dribbled into its electronic components; and our little red Zodiac was either accidentally rammed or intentionally slashed at the Gold River dock. That stuff won’t be in the documentary, because the story of Luna himself is so much more compelling, but it did keep life active for us as filmmakers.
Which leads to a final note: Suzanne and I like to stay on the viewfinder side of a camera. We usually find that the story going on in front of the lens is a lot more interesting than the one going on in the somewhat dishevelled mind of the filmmaker, producer, writer or editor. In this case, however, things got complicated because we actually became a part of the story near the end, doing our own form of bootleg stewardship for Luna after the last official stewardship boats left Nootka Sound, and advocating political change to save him. So to get complete coverage of the unfolding story, we should have pointed the camera at ourselves a bit more. But we didn’t, so you won’t see much of us.
Actually, that’s not a big problem. As you’ll see in the film, Luna is much better looking, and smarter, too.
Luna’s life among humans was wonderful, amazing, sad and, to many of us, inspiring in a unique way. Suzanne and I tried to help Luna himself, and we did not succeed. We feel now that, almost by accident, we are holding in our hands a story that is magnificent in its sweep and drama and in its charming, determined, goofy, urgent, beautiful hero. Events have entrusted us with this story and, to tell the truth, we don’t feel particularly worthy of that responsibility, nor of the task of introducing you to this friend of ours who was a whale. But we hope you will see something in this documentary of who Luna was and why he mattered so very much - to us, to you, and to our precious world.