BLACKFISH in Germany: Let’s get the message across with help from Alaska

When I first saw Blackfish in London in June this year I knew I would do everything to make sure many people will see this eye-opening documentary – especially people who hadn’t heard about our work before. From then on I was on a mission – both personal and work-related. WDC Germany became official partner of the German movie distributor (NFP Marketing and Distribution) responsible for BLACKFISH over here and a few months later another great opportunity presented itself: The Born Free Foundation organized a European tour with former SeaWorld trainer Samantha Berg (who came over all the way from Alaska) to promote BLACKFISH and tell people about her experiences behind the scenes at SeaWorld. Journalists and people who went to the film screenings she was attending had the opportunity to ask questions and talk to Samantha. With the help of the Born Free Foundation WDC Germany invited Samantha to Munich to talk to German journalists and we organized a special screening of BLACKFISH with a Q&A session. This took place on Thursday last week, November 7, at the Monopol cinema here in Munich. Our partner organization Pro Wildlife and our team did everything to make sure the event would be well-attended and I’m happy to report that the screening was sold out.

  Having Samantha Berg as a guest was fantastic. Not only because of her being a former SeaWorld trainer and one of the people actually being in the movie – but especially because of her awesome energy and inexhaustible effort to  get the message across that captivity is wrong. The movie itself is a great asset for our work and Samantha is another one, an amazing ambassador for the orcas suffering in captivity. Before the screening, Samantha spent the whole day in the German WDC office doing one interview after the other: a women’s magazine, a daily newspaper, two freelance journalists and also a men’s magazine took the opportunity to talk to her and had booked an interview in advance. And even after the screening and the Q&A session Samantha took the time to talk to interested people for a long time. Her European tour was already going on for two and a half weeks at that point visiting Spain, Luxemburg, The Netherlands and Belgium before coming to Germany. Italy and UK were up next.

More photos of the event can be found here on Facebook

The message of Samantha Berg and the film BLACKFISH is clear: keeping whales and dolphins in captivity is not only unfair to these intelligent mammals, it is cruel. There is no tank in the world that can replace the ocean and no artificial group that can replace family bonds in the wild.