The Grind
“We have an outdoor slaughterhouse,” a voice tells us in the opening moments of our new documentary, The Grind. On the Faroe Islands, in the North Atlantic between Iceland and Norway, the blue sea often turns blood red. With little agriculture and wildlife available to them, the Faroe Islands have long sought the sea as their main source of food and trade. This has led to the widespread slaughter of whales and other marine life in a practice known as “strangling.” While strangulation has been a tradition on the island for nearly a millennium, it has recently drawn the ire of animal rights activists around the world, who view the murder of these beautiful animals with great contempt and protest.
One such activist is Lamia Etsemli, president of the French association Sea Shepherd, which patrols the region’s waters to protect whales from such abuse. Together with hundreds of other volunteers from around the world, they started a campaign called Operation Grind Stop. “What’s happening here is easy to stop if we want to,” Lamya said. But gathering the willpower of the locals proved to be a major challenge. Most strongly objected to what they saw as the group’s unnecessary intrusion into their way of life and chances of survival. “You are not radicals, you are terrorists!” one protester yelled at the town hall meeting.
While The Grind offers a harrowing account of the brutality of whaling through decades-old film reels, the film also offers a counterpoint to the Faroe Islands themselves. “Grind is part of a larger whole,” says Kjartan Hoydal, a marine ecologist and local islander. “We can only rely on the ocean and we cannot accept that the world is moving in a direction where we cannot use these resources.”
The Grind is a curated exploration of the struggle between a way of life that some consider necessary and others’ quest to promote environmental and human responsibility.
