MUMBAI: Louie Psihoyos, the director of award-winning documentary The Cove about Japan‘s dolphin slaughter, has said that he would attend the screening of the film at the Tokyo film festival which opens on 17 October, knowing fully well that he could be arrested.
Japanese police are of the view that the director and other members of his crew violated trespassing laws when they documented the hunt in the seaside town of Taiji, where 2,000 dolphins are killed every year.
The film shows fishermen on small boats banging on poles to frighten the dolphins into a cove, where they are then killed with spears. The cove is closed off by barbed wire, and the film crew had to film much of the footage covertly.
The Cove has won more than a dozen awards and led to an outpouring of outrage at the hunt. Initially, it wasn‘t part of the program for the Tokyo International Film Festival.
Psihoyos said he wasn‘t concerned about getting arrested if it was for the right cause, saying he sees covert filming as a form of civil disobedience. He also says he disagrees with how Japanese authorities were defining trespassing, because the cove is in a national park.
