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Dolphin Boy
Dani Menkin and Yonatan Nir (Israel, Special Presentations)
Thursday, May 5, 9:00 p.m.
Bloor Cinema (506 Bloor Street West)
Saturday, May 7, 9:45 p.m.
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
In a small Arab village in Israel, 17-year-old Morad is beaten up after sending a text message to a female classmate and left in a totally unresponsive, dissociated state. When other treatments fail, a trauma specialist recommends “dolphin therapy,” and so Morad’s father brings his son hundreds of kilometres away to a dolphin sanctuary on the coast of Israel. The idea is that by diving with the dolphins, Morad will come back to the surface. As his family makes sacrifices to keep him in therapy, Morad does slowly return to consciousness—only now he has re-invented himself as a dolphin boy, born and raised among his dolphin family. All told, it takes four years of dolphin play (not to mention a touch of electroshock therapy) before Morad is ready to accept his past, face his trauma, and return to his village.
Though the dolphins lend some great footage, and though this is a compelling story, its telling is spotty and its final message heavy-handed. That Dolphin Boy asks more questions than it answers might have been a good thing had those questions been ones that gestured outward, raising issues about trauma or the human-animal connection. Instead, Dolphin Boy leaves the viewer with questions about the story itself: the social and possibly religious context in which Morad’s beating occurs, for example, is unaddressed, but seems to be vital to understanding why the traumatic reaction is so extreme. The film’s subjects often refer obliquely to shame, pride, and honour, but the viewer is never fully let in to understand why.