Blackfish

Blackfish (2013) is Gabriela Cowperthwaite's documentary you can watch online on iFILM. It opens with the death of a veteran marine-park trainer in Florida, pulled underwater during a show by an orca named Tilikum.

From there the film works backward. The same whale, it turns out, had been linked to fatal incidents years earlier, starting at a small aquatic park in western Canada. Cowperthwaite stitches the case together from old performance tapes, security footage and frank, often shaken interviews with former trainers. They describe how young male orcas are taken from the open ocean, separated from their pods and confined to cramped concrete tanks for decades. The aggression, they argue, was never a mystery.

The release set off what came to be called the "Blackfish effect": falling attendance, public hearings, and SeaWorld's eventual decision to stop breeding orcas in captivity. What sticks isn't the body count but the trainers' faces, people who once thought they were spreading joy and now can't quite forgive themselves. Stream Blackfish (2013) online on iFILM.