VIFF Pick of The Day : Peace with Seals

Peace With Seals (Mír s tuleni)

Director: Novak Miloslav

By Erin Stringer

The documentary fable Peace With Seals explores the domestication and lengthy exploitation of animals, and dissects what we perceive as “human nature.” The 96 minute film begins with Czech director Miloslav Novák coming across a travel brochure featuring the elusive and almost extinct Mediterranean monk seal. His curiousity piqued about Europe's most endangered animal, he heads out to meet this Sardinian seal face to face.

Using old footage interspersed with new, along with a sections of animation, the film veers in many different directions, through various voices: Novák and narrator, an Italian director who filmed Mediterranean monk seals in 1992, a Czech biologist, scientists, a philosopher and a 98-year-old seal hunter.

We see footage of Ulysses a baby seal, who was tossed ceremoniously into the famous Di Trevi fountain by Italian photographer Federico Patellani. Petellani in front of snapping flashbulbs and clapping onlookers. Film from the event in 1951 shows the crowd gathered around the fountain, and as the frightened seal is pulled from the water, the commentator chuckles cheerily that the chlorinated water just wasn't much to the seal pup's liking, and that he is off to do more sightseeing.

The film then follows the story of another seal: Gaston, who was carried out of zoo captivity by a flood. Unsuccessful rescue workers later share their firm observations that it was not a break for freedom, but rather that he was swept helplessly out to sea, panicking because he was suddenly in a “strange environment.” More recent scenes of school children chanting “Federico, Federico,” to coax a seal in the zoo out of his small, murky exhibit are also sombre and heartrending, but the film is never heavy-handed in its poignant depictions of the seals' plight over the years.

The film has its share of bizarre moments: the Italian director in a bathing suit mimicking a seal flopping on its belly for the camera, the trick candles on the unsuspecting old seal hunter's birthday cake – decorated with blue-icing seals - that he can't blow out, and the excerpts throughout the film from Karel Capek's strange novel War of the Newts.

While some of Peace with Seals seems laboured and weighted down by a few overly lengthy conversations and pieces of historical footage, for the most part it is an informative and darkly entertaining look at what such an anthropomorphic view of animals has brought upon the seal and ourselves.

Peace with Seals comes from "The Ark" section of the Vancouver Film Festival, this year's environmental film series with a wide range of films showcasing mankind's co-existence with animals and the world around us. For all Vancouver Film Festival listings, visit www.viff.org.