Sockeye slime convinces angler to turn the camera on fish farms
Film looks at diseases that threaten salmon and the wider environment
The Pristine Coast Oct. 3 SFU Woodward’s Oct. 7 The Cinematheque Tickets and info: viff.org
Hanging from a bookshelf in the corner of Scott Renyard’s cluttered home office, there’s a kitschy carving of a half-dozen tiny fish dangling from a wooden sign that reads: Born to Fish Forced to Work!
These days, the director of the new documentary The Pristine Coast — playing Friday and Tuesday at the Vancouver International Film Festival — isn’t fishing anymore. And the fish stories the lifelong B.C. angler tells are less about the one that got away than the ones he wished he’d never seen.
Remember the recent uproar over “pink slime” in meat?
The way Renyard describes the salmon that changed his life makes slime sound appetizing. Renyard reeled in a sockeye on the Chilliwack River a few years ago, put it on ice, then took it home to make dinner.
“I cut it open and the flesh kind of dissolved in my hands,” says Renyard, who still looks grossed out by the memory. “I was told that it probably had Kudoa, a fish farm disease that may have spread into the wild population of sockeye and others. Kudoa they say isn’t going to harm humans, but the fact that the flesh is full of a parasite causing the flesh to dissolve certainly made me feel sick. And I certainly didn’t want to eat sockeye after that.”
That’s almost as appetizing an image as the photo of the fish promoting Pristine Coast in the VIFF program that appears to be leaking blood from every orifice.
“The bleeding disease is VHS — viral hemorrhagic septicemia — and it’s in the same order of viruses as Ebola,” explains Renyard. Anyone for sushi? If you thought The Inconvenient Truth was an eco-horror movie, The Pristine Coast is The Fishery of the Living Dead.
A filmmaker who started out studying science (his early passion was botany), after his sockeye self-destructed Renyard reached out to anti-fish farm activist Alexandra Morton to find out if the problems she’d been studying could have travelled so far downstream.
“When I talked to her she said: ‘I think it is affecting things a lot further away than we suspect.’”
Renyard and cameraman Mark Noda visited Morton in Echo Bay in 2010, just in time to catch the start of her anti-fish farm Get Out Migration march. Renyard, who’d recently chronicled the life and death of the killer whale named Miracle had a new story to tell. He kept filming Morton (and her supporters like former B.C. cabinet minister and outspoken media magnet, Rafe Mair) along the rally route.
When the march arrived in Vancouver for the start of the Cohen Commission investigation into B.C.’s salmon situation, Renyard asked for permission to film the courtroom for a bit of colour. Then the media relations person for the inquiry told him there was a camera spot no one had claimed.
“She took me right in and walked me up to the front of the room and I was standing six feet from the commissioner.”
Renyard set up his camera expecting to be evicted after a few days to make room for a major media outlet. Instead, Renyard chronicled almost the entire inquiry collecting roughly 800 hours of footage — which he plans to use as the basis for a more in-depth project about the state of B.C.’s salmon.
Morton told The Sun how impressed she was with Renyard’s dedication to the story of B.C.’s salmon.
“Scott Renyard has taken a massive amount of information about what the salmon farming industry is doing to B.C. and put it together in a film that is riveting.”
During a break, Renyard wanted to find a way to lighten up his documentary. He’d heard about a great fish run at the Harrison River and went to check it out.
“I decided to shoot the good news story,” says Renyard. When he arrived he didn’t find good news — he was greeted by thousands of dead sockeye floating belly-up in the river.
Asked what shocked him most about the eco-horrors he discovered, Renyard offers answers that will surprise anyone who think B.C.’s fish farm politics are just about salmon — or just about B.C.
“What shocked me was that all wild fin fish populations could be affected,” says Renyard, who now suspects that fish farms — and not over-fishing — caused the collapse of Canada’s east coast fisheries. Shock number two: “The implications for climate change. All along we thought that the fish were collapsing because of climate change. But in actual fact it may have been the collapse of the fish that is a contributor to climate change.”
Shock number three: “The fact that here we are on this pristine coast and it’s not that pristine anymore.”