Fabien Raymond-yves Clouette

The legacies of Europe’s whaling pasts co-exist today with concerns about coastal environments and the various societies and cultures that have come to rely upon them. The project examines these links by comparing some of the ways in which tourism industries derive cultural and economic profit from the whaling past, especially in the context of growing massive stranding episodes along the French Atlantic coast. The film follows “whale watchers” in the South/West of France: tourism professionals, volunteers monitoring the strandings, biologists, bio-acousticians, historians specialized in whaling, commercial fishermen… A diverse community that each singularly “watches” a charismatic neighbour, altogether but with different points of view. The project will seek: To demonstrate the central role that whales and other cetaceans have played in European local coastal/maritime heritage; To build cooperative networks between contemporary European stakeholders that seek to profit from this heritage; To use project research to produce a film designed to enhance understandings of the networked nature of this heritage, the conservationist initiatives it fosters, and the coastal communities it serves.