Japan Gets to See Dolphin-Hunting Documentary 'The Cove' - TIME

September heralds the six-month dolphin-hunting season in Taiji, a small seaside town in Japan's southwestern Wakayama prefecture. And residents are sensing the attack on them has also begun.

The Cove — a U.S. documentary with the air of a spy thriller that has been called "advocacy filmmaking at its best" since its release on July 31 — depicts Taiji's centuries-old tradition of killing dolphins with an unflinching eye on the sometimes gruesome process.

The documentarians, led by photographer turned director Louie Psihoyos and dolphin trainer turned activist Richard O'Barry, have stirred both international outcry and acclaim at film festivals from Sundance to Seattle with their footage of the slaughter that takes place every year in a remote cove in Taiji.

Earlier this week, the town decided to release 70 of the roughly 100 dolphins from the previous week's catch. But Taiji fishermen aren't the only ones bowing to international pressure.

Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF) chairman Tom Yoda announced on Sept. 16 that the festival will screen the film, after previously rejecting it for TIFF's official selection (the festival starts next month).

Having come under fire for initially rejecting the documentary, Yoda said the reasons for rejecting or accepting films aren't generally discussed, as the festival receives more than 700 entries each year.

No film festival has a moral obligation to accept a film, but TIFF's slogan of "Action! For Earth" raised more than a few eyebrows when the widely lauded eco-documentary didn't make the cut. In the end, Yoda said, the festival "decided to take The Cove due to international attention worldwide."

The Cove casts Taiji's dolphin hunt as one town's dirty secret...the reality, however, is that Japan culls about 20,000 dolphins across the nation every year. To those in Taiji and other areas where dolphin hunting is permitted, the global reaction to The Cove has a whiff of the enduringly contentious whaling debate (Japan has hunted whales in the name of "SCIENCE" for decades despite environmentalists' ire).

The new wave of criticism of dolphin hunting that has been spurred by the film has many fishermen and local bureaucrats rolling their eyes over what they interpret as a another bout of foreign outrage at a practice that is legal, regulated and culturally acceptable in Japan, where dolphin meat — like whale — is eaten in the regions where it's hunted.