Whaling debate to hit cinemas

Pity whale...whale hunt has become actively carry out around the world. Rather than taking to the seas in a protest flotilla, an Australian filmmaker is filming a "walk a mile in my shoes" style documentary as he hopes to help both sides of the bitter whaling debate to understand each other.

The feature-length documentary will see Wright live with a whaling family and join a whale hunt off the coast of Japan, while the whalers will join him in the Cook Islands and swim with humpback whales.

The swap is the final challenge in a set of dares exchanged between Wright and Japanese filmmaker Hideki Fuji, who, like most Japanese, sees nothing wrong with the country's annual harvest of hundreds of whales.

Wright, the grandson of pioneering African-American author Richard Wright, is an accidental whale conservationist who began the project after a vivid dream in 2006 that involved him swimming with a school of humpback whales after hitting one in a boat.

"This dream was immediately very difficult to shake," Wright told The Weekend Australian.

"I had to do something, and as a filmmaker the only thing I can bring to it is to make a film."

Wright believes the protests that spark angry clashes with the Japanese whaling fleet each summer won't stop the whaling because Japan's government and whaling industry will simply dig their heels in.

"The key to the film is reconciliation and the way we see reconciliation is walking a mile in each other's shoes," he said.

"My standpoint is we have to now shift from a moratorium on sustainability grounds to a moratorium on ethical grounds and at least have an international exchange on the issue and come to a conclusion of some sort."

Fuji thinks whale consumption is declining in Japan and whaling's cultural heritage is overstated, but he tells Wright -- both in the film and real life -- that it's no different to the harvesting of other animals for human consumption.

"To make it personal," Wright said. "Hideki says: 'All right, let's try to get you spend some time with some Japanese whalers and get on their boat and witness a kill'."

How the whalers react to their underwater encounter with their quarry towards the end of the documentary -- which Wright is aiming at a cinematic release -- will be entirely unscripted.

The filmmaker -- who has previously worked for Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson -- has posted a trailer of Whale Like Me online, and filming on the full-length feature is expected to begin next month. Wright has assembled most of the shooting budget and is hoping to secure funding partners and donations in order to complete the film.

my comment : is good to show the world a different way to help people understand the extinction of the whales...pity them...as the demand of whale increase they were hunt and now the population of whales has declined. i love whales and the first film i watched about them was "Free Willy" i guess...i don't remember the title but i'm glad that there are people who concerned about this species...whale is such a wonderful creature~_~