Young Scottish director tackles sensitive issue of whale hunting

Aerial shots of the Faroe Islands, the North Atlantic archipelago between Scotland and Iceland are like vast paintings, majestic compositions of blue skies, brown rocky lands and white mist. When the sea turns red, it’s at first poetic, then shocking.

It’s the aftermath of a whale hunt, a controversial practise many of the Islands’ “48,000 descendants of Vikings” still see as vital to their way of life.

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Nominated for BAFTA Scotland’s best single documentary and best documentary at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, The Islands And The Whales has already won Day numerous awards including the DOC NYC grand jury prize and Best Emerging International Filmmaker at Canada’s Hot Docs, the largest documentary film festival in North America.

Now wider audiences have the opportunity to see the film, which took Day five years to make. Simultaneous screenings will take place on March 29 in a number of cinemas across the UK, including many around Scotland. A live Q&A with Day and Channel Four News anchor Jon Snow will then be streamed live from Picturehouse Central, London.

In April the film will then be released in selected cinemas, with some further screenings being followed by live Q&As with Day.

Those opportunities for discussion are appropriate. Rather than a simplistic diatribe against the supposed evils of whale hunting, the film challenges preconceptions about the Faroese as well as raising complex and vital questions about how we all live.

Formerly a lawyer, Day first met the pilot whale hunters of the Faroes in 2009 when he was shooting The Guga Hunters Of Ness, his debut documentary which followed the last ten seabird hunters permitted to continue a traditional gannet hunt in the Outer Hebrides. The first time since

1959 that the hunters had allowed their tradition to be filmed, the film gave a glimpse into a vanishing world.

The Islands And The Whales is partly a continuation of that previous work, as well as a call to action.

The threat to the Faroese’s traditional food is not activists such as Pamela Anderson telling them all to go vegetarian – an environmentally dubious prospect as all crops must be imported to the supermarkets of these low-yielding lands – but from the whales themselves.

Polluted by mercury, a by-product of burning coal, the creatures are literally toxic.

“There was a lot of suspicion at first when I went to make the film,” says Day, who spent months over the course of the five years with some of the individuals and families featured. “Previously, the other people who had come to make films had done so from an anti-whaling perspective. For me, the audience can make up their own minds on what they feel about that.

“I told the Faroese that they had to accept that people weren’t going to like what they do but that I was going to show it in an unsanitised way. There’s an issue that is bigger than that debate, which is that the oceans are so polluted that it’s harming the sealife and humans.”

Hunted to excess, the populations of puffins and gannets are dropping dramatically. At one point in the film an ornithologist counts just four puffins where thousands should be. Meanwhile, the numbers of whales are sustainable, in distinction to a common meme which has done the rounds for years, including the claim that to take part in the hunt makes a Faroese boy a man. Neither is it true that the hunt takes place every year.

“It’s sporadic throughout the year and even when they find them, quite often the whales escape,” says Day. “There is so much misinformation about the hunt, so I wanted to find out the truth. But the film isn’t ultimately about the whale hunt – it’s a good way of getting people’s attention on to the much bigger issue: that the whales were toxic, and they were so toxic because of the pollutants we are putting into the sea.”

Situated so close to the Arctic Circle, the Islands are on the frontline of environmental degradation, they are the canaries in the mine. But as Day is careful to show, the Islanders are not environmental angels themselves.

“They are as much a part of the pollution problem as we are,” he says. “They use cars and fuel and the internet and plastic. But they are certainly the ones that are feeling it first. A lot of the chemicals that they’re finding were only invented maybe a generation ago, maybe 50 years ago, so the studies they’re doing on their effects is really important.”

A challenging film to make logistically, Day is certain his impressive film was worth the five years.

“As a microcosm of the realities that I wanted to talk about, it was the perfect place to make a film about,” he says. “You can have people denying climate change and saying things aren’t due to man-made actions but if you go there, you see the plastic in the birds and in resting whales. That is the physical reality. It is not a point of view.”

Mar 29, Aberfeldy Birks Cinema, Dumfries Robert Burns Cinema, Dundee DCA, Inverness Eden Court, Isle of Tiree Screen Tiree, Lochmaddy Taigh Chearsabhagh, Orkney Pickaquoy, Ross-shire Way Out West Cinema, Stirling MacRobert, Sleat Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, 7pm (Q&A screening

follows at 8.30pm), prices vary

April 3 Glasgow Film Theatre, April 6 Aberdeen Belmont Cinema, April 9 Edinburgh Grassmarket Community Project (free screening), April 10 Edinburgh Filmhouse and Stornoway An Lanntair, April 19 Bo’ness Hippodrome. For tickets and times, see theislandsandthewhales.com/screenings