Doc Corner: (Belated) Shark Week — 'Playing with Sharks' and 'Fin'

By Glenn Dunks

Sally Aitken’s Playing with Sharks and Eli Roth’s Fin are two very different documentaries but share common ground. Not just in that they are both about sharks, but because they each want to use their platforms to advocate for the preservation of the ocean’s perfect predators. Neither film reaches the heights of other better, similarly themed films (in recent years, I stump heavily for Karina Holden’s Blue), but it’s something of a sad indictment that their very existence is important as the environmental crises happening in our oceans appear so far from being solved.

Aitken’s film chooses to focus its lens on Valerie Taylor, a famed Australian diver whose role in some prominent Hollywood productions (you may know of one called Jaws, but also Blue Water, White Death in 1967) led to being a conservationist. Fin on the other hand is a most unexpected non-fiction diversion for Roth; a film more akin to The Cove than the gory horror features that he is better known for.

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