CONTENTS    

PRESS  AND  DISTRIBUTION  INFORMATION     3                  SYNOPSIS                                                   3                                                                                                                       SCREENINGS                             3        NOMINATIONS                               3                                                                                                                REVIEWS                                       4                                                                                                                                      BACKGROUND  TO  THE  FILM                         4                                                                    MEDIA  STORY:  NZ  GEOGRAPHIC  MAGAZINE                       5      MEDIA  STORY:  TIME  MAGAZINE                                               6                        MEDIA  STORY:  60  MINUTES                 6  CAST                         7  CREDITS                       7  BIOGRAPHIES                 7  INTERVIEW  WITH  DIRECTOR                   9  QUOTES                       10  LINKS                       10

 

 

 

 

 

   

PRESS  AND  DISTRIBUTION  INFORMATION  

PUBLICITY MATERIALS Press, reviews and still images can accessed from our website.

High-res still images can be provided on request.

RIGHTS INFORMATION Soul in the Sea has complete clearances for all on-screen content.

ORIGINAL LANGUAGES

English, Maori

LOGLINE The greatest friendships can come out of the blue

RUNNING TIME

64 minutes

SYNOPSIS

Soul in the Sea is the moving story of one woman’s quest to befriend and protect a wayward, extroverted wild dolphin. Moko’s arrival in a small New Zealand coastal town changes Kirsty Carrington’s life irrevocably, and she devotes herself to protecting him. She is joined by Errin Hallen; a dredging boat skipper who led a solitary existence until Moko found him, and Grant Duffield; a young man with a fear of the water, who feels compelled to follow Moko into his element. As Kirsty and the rest of the community fall in love with Moko, his popularity peaks and his astonishing antics attract worldwide attention. Kirsty worries that he will suffer the same fate as other dolphins whose friendliness caused their early deaths. When conflict over Moko’s fate erupts, Kirsty finds a new source of strength: a connection to her Maori heritage that she had never known. Filmed in the last six months of Moko’s life, Soul in the Sea is a journey of discovery, loss, and resolution. It’s a love story that breaks through the invisible wall between people and animals, celebrating the incredible experience of friendship with a lone wild dolphin.

SCREENINGS  New Zealand International Film Festival, New Zealand, July 2013 (World Premiere)

NOMINATIONS  Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival 2013 - Best People & Nature Program  

 

REVIEWS  

“HEART-WARMING AND CAPTIVATING”

Hans Peter Roth, Author “The Cove”

"A MUST-SEE" Hardy Jones, Executive Director, BlueVoice.org

“COMPELLING STORY… A BEAUTIFUL FILM”

Daniel Rutledge, TV3

“A UNIQUE AND TOUCHING FILM”

Leah Lemieux, Author “Rekindling the Waters: The Truth about Swimming with Dolphins”

"A MOVING DOCUMENTARY... GOES BEYOND THE HEADLINES TO TELL THE REAL STORY.”

Bill Gosden, NZIFF

"TOTAL ADMIRATION FOR THIS FILM”

Wade Doak, Author “Encounters with Whales and Dolphins”

 BACKGROUND  TO  THE  FILM

I was reading the paper when I came across a photo of Moko flying through the air with a stolen boogie board, the leash held in his mouth. I’d heard there was a “friendly” dolphin that had been spending time with people off the east coast of New Zealand’s North Island, but after seeing that photo I was really keen to find him. Not long after that he turned up in Whakatane, an hour from my home in Papamoa. When I did meet Moko it was a long way off Ohope beach, and he swam up to me with a dead baby hammerhead shark in his mouth – I took the offering, and we ended up playing fetch with it for a while. Even with my background as a marine biologist with years spent filming dolphins and whales I was still stunned by the experience. It was an easy decision to start filming, and for the next five months I mostly lived in my van, spending up to ten hours in or on the water each day. It didn’t take long to identify the main people around Moko and I was able to follow Kirsty on her mission to be Moko’s Minder, along with the other locals who became part of Moko’s “human pod”. What unfolded was totally unexpected. I was amazed at the impact Moko had on so many people, and the huge amount of love and respect shown for him after his death. I was kept busy producing, directing, shooting and editing this film over a period of three years, and am grateful for the involvement of Executive Producers Suzanne Chisholm and Michael Parfit, the filmmakers behind the multi award-winning documentary The Whale.

 

 

 MEDIA  STORY:  TIME  MAGAZINE  

 

 

   

MEDIA  STORY:  60  MINUTES    

 

Loved to Death. A Dolphin in Danger - 60 Minutes, TV3 WATCH AT: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeXIDoVgfJ8&feature=youtu.be&t=1m15s

   

 

CAST  

• Kirsty Carrington • Errin Hallen • Grant Duffield • Peter Cavanagh • Dave Peck

• Robert Purewa • Howard Hyland • Andy Bassett • Mike Jones • Jamie Quirk

• Colin Holmes • TJ Haney • Karen Esterhuizen • Martin Williams • Dr Ingrid Visser

• Phil Van Dusschoten • Diane Turner • Pouroto Ngaropo • John Heaphy

CREDITS  

• Amy Taylor: Director, Producer, Cinematographer, Editor • Suzanne Chisholm, Michael Parfit: Executive Producer • James Brown: Online Editor

• Dick Reade: Sound mix and design • Matthew Caradus: Composer • Amit Tripuraneni, ColorLab Pictures: Colour correction • Anthony Terry, Graphic design and website

BIOGRAPHIES  

 

AMY TAYLOR - Director, Producer, Cinematographer, Editor Amy completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Natural History Filmmaking at the University of Otago and Natural History New Zealand. Her student documentary about Hectors dolphins (Beyond the Kelp) was broadcast on Maori TV. Amy has since worked on various documentaries, short films, commercials and music videos as a producer, director, cinematographer and editor. Soul in the Sea is her first feature-length documentary. MICHAEL PARFIT - Executive Producer Michael Parfit is an award-winning writer and filmmaker based in British Columbia. He has written five books and numerous magazine articles for National Geographic, Smithsonian and others. He co-wrote the script for the IMAX film Antarctica, and wrote the script for the award-winning IMAX film Ocean Oasis. He also co-directed and wrote the scripts for Saving Luna and The Whale, feature documentaries which were released theatrically and broadcast worldwide. Saving Luna won 25 awards from around the world and The Whale was named Critic’s Pick by the New York Times and

 

Washington Post. He co-directed, filmed and wrote over 20 stories for the National Geographic Channel - US, on subjects as diverse as puffins, melting ice in Greenland, the Inuit of Nunavut, Newfoundland fisheries, rising sea levels in the Netherlands, ecological hotspots in the South Pacific, and minorities in Europe. He also directed and wrote The Search for the Never Never, a one-hour documentary about the Australian environment. SUZANNE CHISHOLM - Executive Producer Suzanne Chisholm is a documentary filmmaker based in British Columbia. She is the producer, co-director and co-cinematographer of Saving Luna, a multi-award winning feature documentary about a lone orca named Luna. Saving Luna was released theatrically in Canada, and has been broadcast around the world. She also produced, co-directed, and co-filmed The Whale, another version of the story of Luna, narrated by Ryan Reynolds. The Whale was named Critics’ Pick by the New York Times and Washington Post, and released theatrically in the US, Australia and New Zealand. She filmed, produced and co-directed over 20 news features for National Geographic Channel, on subjects such as puffins, Newfoundland fisheries, climate change in Greenland, and the Inuit. Her work has been broadcast on PBS, CNN, National Geographic Channel, BBC, CBC, NHK, France 2, Al-Jazeera, and in numerous countries around the world. She has served on numerous film festival juries. JAMES BROWN - Editor James has edited for New Zealand’s top documentary filmmakers: Annie Goldson, Pietra Brettkelly, Tom & Sumner Burstyn and regularly edits for producers of TV and online content for corporate and community outreach programs: Ogilvy, FarmerClark, The Human Rights Commission, The Learning Connexion and Myspace. He has directed numerous short documentaries, music videos, and internet spots which has involved traveling to Africa and the US. He recently completed his directorial debut feature documentary “Red, White, Black & Blue” which follows the journey of two school rugby teams from South LA touring New Zealand and has won awards at numerous festivals around the world, including Best Documentary at the Idyllwild Cinema Fest. MATTHEW CARADUS - Composer Matt has been writing music for film and documentary for the past 4 years. After completing his Music honors degree at Otago in 2010 he moved to Auckland where he lives currently. Working with orchestral sample software and live instrumental recordings Matt creates a wide variety of music from beautiful to quirky to powerful. Notable projects Matt has worked on recently include Inorganic (Elena Doyle, NZFC Premiere short) Steep street (George Dawes, short for BBC Know), Gone Curling (Rachel Patching, Roland Kahurangi, finalist in Wildscreen, Banff and best Short Doco: Edge Festival 2012). Matt is currently working on the music for Kiwi director Logan Judd’s debut feature: Enmity. Matt is not only a skilled orchestral composer but is very flexible working in folk, rock and electronic styles and often mixes these elements into his composition. He plays violin, mandolin, guitar, drums and didgeridoo and performs regularly with his sister Talia. He has recorded engineered and produced several folk/pop crossover albums.

 

AMIT TRIPURANENI, COLORLAB PICTURES - Colorist Amit is a filmmaker and a multi-hyphenate creative. He produced and directed 2 independent award winning digital feature films, that got distribution deals in NZ/Australia as well as overseas. Besides directing, Amit’s involvement in film and television ranges from editing to acting to broadcast television. In Sept 2012, Amit along with 3 others, setup ‘ColorLab Pictures’, a boutique post-production facility, specializing in color grading. The focus of the organization has been to provide a comprehensive and affordable service to filmmakers, to attain the best possible end results for their projects. During this time he has been involved as a grade-producer and colorist on projects ranging from NZFC funded short film ‘Uphill’ (directed by Jackie Van Beek) to independent feature film ‘Crackheads’ (directed by Tim Tsiklauri) to web series ‘Flat-3’ (directed by Roseanne Liang). Amit also recently delivered a rough cut of a 5-minute sizzle reel for ‘Hip-Hoperation’, a documentary that recently received early development funding from NZFC (directed by Bryn Evans). DICK READE - Sound mixer Dick Reade is a multi-award winning sound mixer who has been doing sound for film and TV since 1970. He is well known in the industry and has numerous credits including Mt Zion, How far to Heaven, Strongman, and Operation Overdue.

FLICKS  INTERVIEW  WITH  DIRECTOR  

Moko the dolphin is a treasured Whakatane icon well-known in New Zealand. Did you have to fight off any other filmmakers in order to make a documentary on him? Moko was originally from Mahia where he spent most of his life, but I only heard about him not long before he turned up in Whakatane. I didn’t come across anyone else making a documentary about him which I was quite amazed about - I guess I was just lucky that at that time I was free to spend a few months based in Whakatane filming, and it helped to have a background in wildlife filmmaking and marine biology. When you first started filming Moko, what were you originally trying to achieve? Around the time I started filming I watched “The Cove” - an Oscar-winning documentary about dolphins in Japan being rounded up and slaughtered or bought by dolphin trainers. I was completely shocked by it. The doco also shows that in the last couple of decades there’s been a lot of research into dolphin intelligence and the results caused many people to re-think the way they were being treated in captivity and in the wild. There’s now a lot of support in the scientific community for dolphins to have “non-human person status” - they share many of the same brain structures and functions as humans, and dolphins like Moko have given many people the chance to see this intelligence first hand. I thought that a documentary about him would put a face and personality to the countless dolphins that are killed or kept in captivity each year, and inspire people to help protect them and most importantly to stop going to dolphin shows like the ones at Seaworld. I also wanted to record a unique piece of NZ history – it’s not often a friendly dolphin like Moko comes along! And although some people thought there was no story I liked the idea of spending the summer following him around with a camera, and I felt like something would unfold. What was the biggest difficulty you faced when the story approached its end? I was pretty attached to Moko after a few months filming, so when we went to Matakana to identify his body it was very emotional. I struggled to keep filming. I’d never experienced death before – and even though he was “just a dolphin” to some people he felt like a lot more to those who knew him and spent time with him.

 

The other difficulty was editing the many hours of footage I had shot – since I was doing almost everything myself (shooting, directing, editing etc) sometimes it was hard to figure out what to include in the film but as the editing progressed it became a lot clearer. Could you share your strongest memory from filming? There were quite a few really memorable moments… One evening when the sun was going down and I was the last person in the water Moko fell asleep next to me and we just floated for a while, heads touching, until I got too cold and started trying to slowly move towards the shore but he kept opening one eye briefly and moving in front of me to block me, it was really subtle but made me realize he just really wanted company - I stayed in until I was freezing! He didn’t always try to keep people in the water though – I think he got a bit concerned about me once because I was floating on my back not moving, I heard him echolocating underneath me (using sonar to see if I was ok) then when I still didn’t move he pushed me about 20 metres into the shore. Another time I stayed on a yacht overnight and Moko turned up around midnight with a boogie board wanting to play… it was a beautiful night with a full moon so I got in the water and he started jumping over me! When I finally got out we still didn’t get much sleep because he spent most of the time banging into the rudder and whistling trying to wake us up.  

QUOTES

"Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much... the wheel, New York, wars, and so on, whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely the dolphins believed themselves to be more intelligent than man for precisely the same reasons." Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy “When I look into the eyes of an animal I do not see an animal. I see a living being. I see a friend. I feel a soul.” A.D. Williams "To the dolphin alone beyond all other, nature has granted what the best philosophers seek: friendship for no advantage" Plutarch, 62 AD

Director Amy Taylor with Moko (Photo by Mike Smith)

LINKS

www.soulinthesea.com www.facebook.com/soulinthesea www.facebook.com/mokodoco