Documentary "The Rest of Life: Swimming Together" - 10 years chasing sharks, even impressing scholars
Public Television environmental documentary director Ke Jin-yuan has used his lens to document Taiwan's air pollution, groundwater and coastal change. After an absence of 3 years, he once again turned his gaze back to the ocean, crossing Japan, the Philippines and Australia, and in May this year completed Asia's first whale shark documentary, "The Rest of Life: Swimming Together", telling in detail Taiwan's journey from eating whale sharks to conservation and captive keeping.
Although he has successfully climbed peaks of more than 5,000 m in the Himalayas and crossed Antarctica at minus 30 degrees Celsius, underwater remains the hardest scene for Ke Jin-yuan to film. Because the issues are hidden beneath unfathomable water, mainstream media are unwilling to invest time, which makes him feel all the more that he must record these unseen things. Spending 10 years diving, waiting and gazing, he only hopes to make this "landlocked people of an island nation" rethink the relationship between humans and nature. "What happens underwater cannot be seen on land. Even if you go down, it does not mean there will definitely be something, but if you never do it, you will never know."
"If others do less of it, then let me do it!"
In 2005, a whale shark that strayed into a set net in Yilan was brought in by the National Museum of Marine Biology and Aquarium in Pingtung under the name of research and education. From then on its name became "Whale Shark No. 2", and its home shrank from the vast ocean to a 12 m deep aquarium tank. After the 2008 ban on catching whale sharks and more than a million visits, its size grew from 2 m at the start to 7 m. Under protests from animal protection groups, the aquarium decided last July to release it back to the sea, but it became stranded on the coast and finally slowly sank to the seabed, its fate unknown.
In this failed release process, the first people to witness Whale Shark No. 2 surfacing and hitting a rock were the research team from National Taiwan Ocean University and Ke Jin-yuan's documentary team. At the time, among all Taiwan media, only they had the exclusive record of Whale Shark No. 2's final figure slowly sinking; this was not accidental, but the accumulation of more than 10 years by Ke Jin-yuan.
Wang Cheng-chih, who introduced the "Wild View International Nature Film Festival" to Taiwan, believes that solid investigation and research, as well as deep grassroots concern, are precisely what makes this film most valuable. Sometimes conservationists are too eager to convey their claims, invisibly producing self-righteous stubbornness and intellectual arrogance. Although Master Ke has his own persistence, he does not therefore override others, fully revealing the gentleness and honesty of a farmer. The vision of "The Rest of Life: Swimming Together" therefore goes beyond Taiwan and has the potential to become an important work for Asia and even the whole world.
"The Rest of Life: Swimming Together" films whale sharks, but it is not only about whale sharks. Respect for life, and therefore rethinking the relationship between humans and the ocean, is the idea the film most wants to convey. "People are unfamiliar with the ocean, and unfamiliarity produces misunderstanding. If they cannot understand, they will not care. Living on an island, they have nevertheless become a people separated from the sea."
Ke Jin-yuan's action of filming whale sharks will not stop, because the issue never has a day when it ends. When change will appear is still uncertain; all that is needed is to wait quietly, like a whale shark hidden in the depths, gently yet firmly watching over its home.
Note: "The Rest of Life: Swimming Together" documentary - Public Television premiere times:
5/5 (Mon) 22:00 Part 1 - The story of how Taiwanese people have used whale sharks over the past nearly 20 years and the whale shark's "rest of life".
5/6 (Tue) 22:00 Part 2 - Islands of the Northwest Pacific, and a discussion of the experience of humans and whale sharks "swimming together" and values.
"The Rest of Life: Swimming Together" documentary Trailer 1
http://youtu.be/KqhIMs9RG8g
Trailer 2
http://youtu.be/tz3hIfoEbnM
Trailer 3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hwiz2bpBUWk
Official website
http://viewpoint.pts.org.tw/whaleshark/
(This article was sponsored by the Jianzhen Environmental Education Foundation for personnel expenses, but it does not interfere at all with news topics, interviews or writing, ensuring news independence.)