We are so busy looking at the sky and waiting for signs from there that we forget how much we still have to discover and understand on this planet. It took filmmaker Craig Foster a year of his life to track an octopus to understand that it's possible to connect with something that not only doesn't speak our language but lives in an environment alien to us. Patrick and the Whale is My Octopus Teacher to the power of ten, thanks to director Mark Fletcher and Patrick Dykstra, a photographer and marine scientist who has been completely fascinated by whales since childhood.
He left his job as a lawyer to devote his life to the huge animals, then travelled the world far and wide in search of the blue whale, his first passion. Along the way he met many types of whales, he studied and documented them all, but the one that completely changed his life and his perspective on his relationship with them was the sperm whale Dolores.
If Moby Dick bows to the overwhelming immensity of the animal, Patrick swims around it, films it, photographs it and rattles his camera to say hi. Female sperm whales have a distinctive greeting that resembles Morse code: three ticks, followed by two ticks, a metallic, echoing jagged-wheel sound. The sperm whale responds. Then Patrick twists in the water and the whale imitates the movement. The image is incredible. Patrick is a gnat next to Dolores.
Studies are now being done to decipher the language of whales. But Patrick stops at the boundary between passion and science, a boundary he cannot cross without, he feels, losing the animal's trust. So, he teeters on the edge with the frustration of the man who cannot, not in a single lifetime, not by himself, go far enough to erase any suspicion of ecstatic anthropomorphism. Patrick and the Whale is a documentary that looks fabulously impossible, a close encounter on earth with animals that, on closer inspection, are more alien even than the aliens we so desperately want to reach.
Tuesday, June 13, 21:45 - Unirii Open Air
Tuesday, June 13, 21:45 - Parc Poligon Florești