Whereas the themes inside “After the Chunk” are as lasting as our ticking time on this planet, it focuses them on a tragedy in 2018, when a younger man named Arthur Medici was attacked and killed by a shark off a seashore in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. The assault wasn’t a fluke—nice white sharks had been seen extra typically close to the seashores in previous years. But it surely impressed a wealth of varied responses. Some individuals wished to discover ways to higher dwell with them, just like the scientists who tag sharks and might comply with their motion. Others thought of the place to put guilt: on unhealthy infrastructure, on the ballooning seal inhabitants that mixes with human swimmers, and extra.
Meeropol’s movie doesn’t push the tensions in these head-butting views or attempt to make a lot of a plot about them. However the documentary’s observant nature is loads fascinating, because it appears to be like on the many beings who really feel the immediacy of this drawback and are individuals in an ecosystem that doesn’t prioritize a human’s security. Suzy, a head lifeguard, tells us a couple of nightmare she has a couple of shark assault; John, a father, and resident of Wellfleet, talks about how he would not let his surfer daughter within the water after Arthur’s loss of life, and tells a city corridor assembly that people aren’t being protected. “After the Chunk” is stuffed with loads of meals for thought of a difficulty that it magnifies and treats with many distinct POVs.
It’s not simply by means of interviews, however with Meeropol’s following-around footage, like after we’re in Suzy’s automobile as she drives to work or on a ship with a gaggle of fishermen venting about how international warming has altered the fishing scene, for each sharks and their livelihood. We even get a seal’s POV as a fisherman hawks chum into the blue; the digital camera is thrashed about, ran into by leathery noses and whiskers. (Meeropol’s movie has an necessary stance—it really works to deal with animals as equals.) In a single concise passage after one other, “After the Chunk” appears to be like at completely different gamers in this conundrum, placing a microscope on this neighborhood that has been polarized by terror.
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