‘The Last Dolphin King’: IDFA Review

Dirs/scrs: Luis Ansorena Herves, Ernest Riera. Spain. 2022. 94mins

The commercial exploitation and potential mistreatment of wild animals form the disturbing focus of The Last Dolphin King, a behind-the-headlines Spanish documentary tracing the messy mid-2010s downfall of world-renowned trainer Jose Luis Barbero. The film bows in a non-competitive section at IDFA before heading to Netflix on November 25, the streamer presumably hoping to nab a slice of the audience of their 2021 Best Documentary Oscar winner My Octopus Teacher, although this stand-alone feature seems destined to make much smaller waves.

 Illuminatingly sketches the often-murky background of the dolphin business and its finances

The film’s most obvious predecessors are Louie Psihoyos’ Oscar-winner The Cove (2009) and Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s BAFTA-nominated Blackfish (2013) — the former about dolphin hunting in Japan, the latter examining the plight of captive orcas. But writer-directors Luis Ansorena Herves and Ernest Riera aren’t swimming in such creative waters; their handling of the material adheres to the functional level of TV investigative journalism.

Working with a trio of editors (Daniel Arvizu, Elodie Leuthold and Guillermo Cobo), Ansorena Herves and Riera detail the controversies that swirled around Barbero following his high-profile appointment as main dolphin-trainer at Atlanta’s Georgia Aquarium in early 2015. Jaime G. Sorriano’s score underlines each beat in unsubtle style.

This news triggered the circulation of a 99-second video purporting to show Barbero using unacceptably violent techniques in his handling of the famously intelligent and sociable aquatic mammals. The main scoop of this documentary is that the activists responsible for that video “decided to speak publicly for the first time”; the main whistleblower in the case, an underling of Barbero at the Mallorca park — a huge facility frequently shown via drone footage here — conversely elected to stay put in the shadows.

As the film notes via one of its myriad talking-head interviewees, dolphinaria are a byproduct of mass tourism, usually to be found in much-visited spots such as Tenerife (here passingly but crushingly derided as a “Guantanamo for cetaceans.”) Along with Mallorca, this was one of the two Spanish tourism destinations where Barbero established his reputation before being headhunted by the Atlanta aquarium, and where his abrasive (“demanding” is the repeated euphemism) management techniques proved highly taxing for many of his human colleagues.

Barbero strenuously denied any mistreatment of his endearing charges; his employers likewise challenged the veracity of the 99-second montage, alleging that innocuous material had been doctored to misleadingly cast Barbero in the worst possible light. But within weeks the story had reached a tragic conclusion, an outcome implied from the early stages here but only directly addressed in the final ten minutes of a brisk 94-minute running-time.

By this juncture the film has illuminatingly sketched the often-murky background of the dolphin business and its finances, such as the fact that an untrained animal worth €200,000 can reach of a value of €1m after being “educated” to perform by a top-flight handler such as Barbero. Not that the dolphin gets much out of the showbiz-style extravaganzas other than plenty of fish to eat: “For a dolphin it’s the most boring thing in the world,” one expert asserts.

But the real focus here is, as the title indicates, Barbero. The prickly Spaniard emerges as a complex, often difficult individual, a classic example of a highly driven perfectionist who was probably much more at ease among mute collaborators in the water than among humans (and their fragile egos) on dry land. Whether or not he was guilty of the main charge of dolphin abuse is left unresolved. But it is hard to imagine many viewers coming to the end of The Last Dolphin King with an increased desire to visit a dolphinarium or similar commercial enterprise.