‘SEA OF SHADOWS’
It’s called the “cocaine of the sea”: the swim bladder of the totoaba fish, which sells for thousands to black-market customers in China who prize its alleged healthenhancing properties. The fish represents cash flow to poachers in Mexico’s Sea of Cortez, whose nets supply a chain that links Mexican cartels to the Chinese underworld. Those nets also pose a grave risk to the vaquita porpoise, a species perilously close to extinction. In the suspenseful “Sea of Shadows,” director-cinematographer Richard Ladkani tracks a team of conservationists, scientists and Mexican law enforcement officers as they take on the destructive alliance.
“As soon as I dove in, I realized what a symbolic story it was,” said Ladkani, an Austrian who reunited much of the crew that made 2017’s elephant poaching documentary “The Ivory Game,” which likewise counts Leonardo DiCaprio as an executive producer. “It’s not about the vaquita, it’s about what’s happening to planet Earth everywhere.”
The seriousness of the topic made production value even more critical for the film, a National Geographic Documentary Films release that won an audience prize at the Sundance Film Festival.
“We felt like we were in the middle of a thriller kind of movie,” Ladkani said. “We have armed cartel guys and they’re shooting people on the street, and we have undercover ex-FBI people, there are hidden cameras and [people] infiltrating the Chinese mafia.” The filmmaker and his team had to keep their wits about them, and also pull off discreet multiple-camera shots of the operations as they went down. There wouldn’t be any second takes.
“It’s purposely made more commercial,” he said, “so we can appeal to an audience that can make things change.”