Jennifer Sarin Loewenstein

I watched this movie by chance thinking I’d fall asleep halfway through it. Instead I was pulled into it more & more. It is a film about love, war, & survival. When we meet the main character, Zosia, she is still a cheerful, light-hearted young girl with no real knowledge of the world. The events in the film, however, force her to grow up in a way no one would ever wish on anyone. Issues of nationalism, chauvinism, violence, brutality, & sheer evil drag us through the story as we see Zosia, who becomes a young mother, confronting each. At first, her heartbreak is personal She is torn between love for one man and obedience to her father, which means marrying another. It is unclear which of the two men is her child’s father, surely a symbol of the vicious animosity and love/hate between and among different groups of people (particularly the Poles & Ukrainians). When war breaks out, personal issues have to take a back seat to the overwhelming need to survive. This is a piece of history few in the West have heard of: the nationalist fury that pitted Pole & Ukrainian senselessly against each other in the midst of World War II and the greater Russian-German conflict around it. I recommend this film highly, but brace yourself. Some of the scenes are horrifying.

Blackfish raises the unavoidable questions around keeping wild animals in captivity for the purpose of human entertainment. It is a searing expose of the psychological and emotional damage suffered by these animals whose lives are devoid of the stimuli they find in their natural environment. The animals spend two-thirds of their lives in darkened water tanks so that they can be trained and marketed as performing orcas. I’d like to think common sense would make humans recognize how devastating life in captivity would be for these animals; but Blackfish shows us that, on the contrary, the profits reaped by selling whale shows and the like at Sea World is what drives this barbaric industry.