We Call Them Killers
1972 · 15m · Canada
Directed by Tom Shandel
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
At Victoria's Sealand aquarium, captive orcas Haida and Chimo play and perform in close rapport with their trainers rather than showing aggression. Cetologist Paul Spong discusses efforts to communicate across species while musician Paul Horn plays flute for Haida.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone wants to feel good about orcas being happy in pools, but Shandel won't let you—the film's real provocation isn't the tenderness, it's the question it refuses to answer, which is basically every question that matters.
A masterwork of observational restraint that positions itself squarely in the lineage of 70s scientific documentary, where the formal decision to let Spong and Horn's ideas breathe alongside the animals' own indifference becomes the entire argument.
The flute performance could've been sentimental wallpaper, but Horn plays it with such formal distance—almost clinical—that it becomes the pivot point where the whole film shifts from wonder into something genuinely unsettling about what we think we know.