"luna followed the song and they turned into the wind"

.…On assignment from Smithsonian Magazine, Chisholm and Parfit, who are married, initially arrived in Gold River, British Columbia, in the spring of 2004 to cover Luna's attempted capture by Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans. They wound up living in that inlet town for almost three years, documenting an iconic relationship between people and nature that broke all rules.

At the start of the film, Parfit narrates, "There is a wall, built of fear and respect, which normally stands between humans and wild beings. We humans tell sweet and magical fables about going through that wall and making friends with a mysterious creature on the other side. ... But we don't think it could actually happen."

That theme resounds throughout the film: whether it was possible to actually befriend a wild animal such as Luna, and whether friendship could have saved him. To some, this idea may verge on anthropomorphism, but Parfit contends it is a legitimate way of understanding how Luna himself broke that barrier.

"My sense of it," explains the filmmaker, "is that the social need that he had and that we have, that we call friendship, is extremely complicated in our lives and in theirs. In the details it's going to be different. But that big thing we think of as 'friendship,' which encompasses all of those emotional structures, is a good metaphor for what he needed and a good metaphor for what we sensed when we looked in his eye."

And a look into Luna's eyes is just what viewers get. We are virtually introduced to the playful, winsome orca, sometimes through stunning underwater photography, and sometimes through the moving first hand accounts of the people who encountered Luna and whose interactions with him are captured on tape. We are also afforded a view of the orca from the cultural perspective of Nootka's first nations people, for whom killer whales are esteemed protectors of the sea and who believed Luna embodied the spirit of their deceased chief.

The film presents an eye-opening depiction of the attempt to capture the orca, and the Mowachat/Muchalaht tribe's nonviolent confrontation to stop it. As the tribe paddles out into the sound, singing to lure the orca away from his would-be captors, Parfit's narration evokes the mystical.

"Luna followed the song and they turned into the wind. An ancient people trying to make a modern legend of sea and spirit with a little whale."

read it all:
"Saving Luna documents lost baby killer whale's struggle"
by Stephan Michaels, San Francisco Chronicle 27 January 2008