The Vancouver International Film Festival was a tremendous launch for The Pristine Coast. The hard work from the staff and volunteers behind-the-scenes was truly amazing. I attended each of the screenings, including the repeat screening, and the Q and A sessions were very enthusiastist. Here are some of the questions that came way during these sessions and my answers again. Of course, I’ve edited both the questions and answers to make them more readable.
Q: Can you talk more about the headlines that appear in the film?
A: Most of the headlines that appear in the film are from The Fisherman News. Sean Griffen, the current editor and the UFAWU (United Fishermen and Allied Workers Union) gave me permission to use those articles in the film. Geoff Meggs, the former editor, also appears in the film and wrote many of the stories and articles from the early days of fish farming. This newspaper was a tremendous source of information for me and, as a result, I was able to piece together a much better overview of the early fish farm industry off the coast of British Columbia.
Q: Is your film finished, I see sprockets from the old footage?
A: Actually, this was an artistic choice. One of my film transfer houses, Lifetime Heritage Films, transfers the full image including the sprockets from 16 mm and 8 mm film stock. The aspect ratio of old film stock is 4:3 which is square and not wide screen 16:9. So whenever I include old footage in my films you have this problem. Do you keep the 4:3 and make it “pillarbox” which means you fill the sides of the frame with black. Or do you zoom in and take a widescreen frame and lose the top and bottom of the original frame. Zooming in usually means the footage will be much more grainy. So in this case, I decided to keep the sprockets and not crop the image at all. I think the sprockets make the image more interesting. And we even added it to some 4:3 images that didn’t have it. It also helps to convey the fact that these images are from an earlier time.
Q: The pace of your film moves along quickly, how did you do that?
A: I appreciate this feedback a lot. I do write drama scripts and my editor, Maja, is also a drama editor. We wanted to make sure the film didn’t drag. So I spent a long time, about a year, working on the script. I approach my documentaries like I would write a dram and work up a full script. This isn’t always easy because documentaries you don’t have control of what your characters say. So weaving the stories together from interviews is often very challenging. All of the people who appeared in the film reveal so many things, it’s hard to know what to keep and what to leave in the film.
I also did a ton of research. I felt this topic needed to have a certain level of detail and that detail, I think, feeds the narration. Kirby did a wonderful job by delivering a voice that was clear and matter-of-fact which is what I was looking for. I knew that in places it might be challenging to follow, but from the response to the film, it seems to work. And we didn’t have to leave out important parts of the story. From a writer’s point-of-view I’m very happy with the story structure, but it wasn’t easy getting there.
Q: Did you shoot all of the footage yourself?
A: No, I didn’t. I am listed as one of the cameramen and I did shoot a fair bit of b-roll for the film myself. But my DOP Mark traveled with me during get Get Out Migration and he handled all of the interviews. I also rely heavily on footage from other film makers. Dick Harvey, who has passed away, used to work for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. His widow Kathleen licensed his footage to me for the film. The underwater shots inside the open net Chinook pens are a very unique and rare look inside a fish farm net pen from the 1980’s. I also couldn’t have made the film without film makers like Twyla Roscovich, Damien Gillis, Anissa Reed, and many others. They’ve followed this story a lot longer than I have and captured important images of fish farming locally and overseas.
I spend a lot of time looking for images of the actual events discussed in my films. As an example, when Brad Hope mentions the test farm at the Pacific Biological station, the footage of chum salmon in the net pen is from one of the early pilot studies. It was filmed by Dick Harvey and is actually from that pen. This was an amazing find.
One other thing I should mention. I’ve also acquired the rights to two of Dick Harvey’s short films, “Living River” and “Indian Food Fishing on the Fraser River”. I’ve had them remastered and hopefully they will find a home on TV soon. They are both very interesting and take us back a bit in time on the BC coast. You can learn more about these films on this website.
Q: The ending is very shocking, where did you get the footage of that?
A: Like I said about, a lot of the footage came from other film makers and researchers that were out in the field. I knew when I began to see all these images of fish, dying or dead, before spawning that it needed to be in the film. And it wasn’t until we finished our first rough cut that I felt we needed to show in a short sequence that all of these die-offs were up and down the coast and were still happening now. So, in the end, I decided to do the montage with locations and dates over the images. Maja did a fantastic job at pacing it and cutting together images. We actually had more examples, but dropped some because we were worried about the overall length of the film.
Q: Your connection to climate change caught me completely by surprise, how did that come about?
A: Well, for me, that is the most important discovery I make in the film. And I have to thank Dr Trisha Atwood and Dr Pieter Tans, who appear in the film. I was reading a story about Dr Atwood’s work and was amazed to learn that when she removed predators from her test aquatic ecosystem that C02 emissions went up by 90%. It literally sent a shiver down my spine. I realized, at that moment, that the widespread collapse of wild fish populations from disease was likely having the same effect.
Climate change was thought to be the primary cause of the collapse of wild fish populations, especially salmon. But I believe it’s the other way around. Fish die-offs are likely contributing to climate change and the release of C02 from the oceans. I’ve been told that the surface layers of some parts of the Salish sea, for example, are now around 1200 ppm C02. This is three times higher than the atmosphere. This is a very serious problem.
Q: How many fish species do you think are affected?
A: Well, I link a number of species to this issue in the film. Eulachon, Fraser River white sturgeon, herring on the Pacific Coast and Northern cod, capelin, and Atlantic salmon on the east coast are some examples. But I think many, if not all fin fish, have suffered impacts from diseases that are incubated in or around open net fish farms.
There are likely exceptions. For example, lamprey eels appear to be increasing in numbers. This might mean they have resistance to diseases in other fish they feed on. And if this is the case, they may benefit from having a lot of potential prey trapped in pens. If eels can attach themselves to fish (prey) more easily, it’s not hard to image their numbers could increase dramatically. So I think more work needs to be done to determine if eels are another vector for disease transmission and what this might mean in the context of the fish farming industry. Clearly the dramatic increase in sea lice populations has been the main way for pathogens to move from one fish population to the other. But maybe it’s not the only way.
I focus on three diseases in my film, but there are many others like Infectious Salmon Anemia virus. I personally feel that Viral Hemorraghic Septicemia (VHS) many be the virus that caused many species to die suddenly during the 1980’s and 1990’s. This virus is in the same order of viruses as Ebola and is highly adaptable. And by moving eggs around the world to fish farms, it has spread around the world. It seems this virus is still playing a very significant role in herring die-offs, but more research is needed to understand how many other fish species are still suffering significant losses from this pathogen.
Q: What can we do to help?
A: This is a tough question to answer because I don’t know what it would take to convince our politicians at the provincial and federal levels to close open net pen fish farms. It’s really obvious that controlling sea lice and disease is a very difficult thing to do effectively in open water. They might be able to protect their farmed fish, but how do you really stop wild fish from congregating around the pens? And it appears to me the biggest reason for the open net pen style of farming is to graze on wild juvenile fish. There is no way to control the rate of grazing or to easily measure if it is sustainable. Based on the declines of the wild fish populations, it’s not sustainable.
Having said this, here are some things I think will help….
Talk to your MLA and MP. Tell them we want and expect changes to the industry and that they need to adopt closed containment on land.
Sign Watershed watch’s petition
Don’t buy farmed salmon unless it comes from farms that are on land.
Support Alexandra Morton’s work.
Ask Government to supply labs so that average Canadians can send in fish samples for testing. I think everyone should know what diseases might be in their fish and their food.
Protest peacefully, but with resolve to demand change.
— Scott Renyard,