Gabriela Cowperthwaite makes documentaries that cut like thrillers and dramas that borrow from documentary, and the best of them, Blackfish, is more persuasive than it is fair. She is a director of arguments, and she wins them, sometimes a little too easily.
Fi1m perspective
In Blackfish (2013) a killer whale performs for a stadium and the picture is somebody's home video, shot from the stands. Cowperthwaite holds it, cuts to a former trainer at a kitchen table, comes back, and holds it again. She does not tell you what is about to happen. She lets the tape, and the time she stays on it, do the telling. That is her habit: a case assembled from footage nobody meant her to have, laid out one piece at a time, with the outcome kept back until the last possible moment.
She came to it slowly. After degrees in political science she spent more than twelve years making commissioned documentaries for television, for National Geographic, ESPN, the History Channel and Discovery, and her first independent feature was City Lax: An Urban Lacrosse Story (2010). Blackfish is the film that got her noticed. It has one argument, made in 83 minutes: killer whales should not be kept in tanks, and the park that kept them knew the risk and told its customers otherwise. The park changed its practices afterwards. Few documentaries can say that.
Since then she has alternated. Megan Leavey (2017), her first scripted feature, follows a US Marine and her military dog in Iraq; Our Friend (2019) is about a couple facing a terminal illness and the friend who stays; I.S.S. (2023) is a thriller set on the International Space Station. Between them she went back to documentary for The Grab (2022), on the buying up of the world's natural resources. We have reviewed none of these, so we will say only that the pattern is plain: people and animals in captivity or in service, and institutions that look one way from outside and another from within. She has said that scripted work came with a learning curve, and that what keeps her going in documentary is the moment nobody planned.
What works in Blackfish is the cutting. Eli Despres and Cowperthwaite build each incident like a thriller, in pieces, and we sat forward every time, because the footage is real and the people in it did not know how the day would end. What works less well is what surrounds the footage. Christopher Towey and Jonathan Ingalls shoot the interviews plainly, which is fine, and Jeff Beal's score keeps telling us what we have just seen, which is not. By the third incident we had noticed the method, and noticing it cost the film a little of our trust. We think it is right. We are less sure it is fair, and the difference matters for a director whose films exist to persuade.
She has described the thread in her documentaries as "pulling back the curtain on the things we thought we knew". That is the right description of Blackfish, and it is worth your evening. Watch it knowing that the person pulling the curtain has already decided what you will find behind it.
Biography
Gabriela Cowperthwaite is an American filmmaker who directs, writes, produces and edits documentaries and feature films. She studied political science at Occidental College and the University of Southern California, and began her career making commissioned television documentaries for channels including ESPN, National Geographic and the History Channel.
Her first feature-length documentary, City Lax: An Urban Lacrosse Story (2010), aired on ESPN. She is best known for Blackfish (2013), which she directed, wrote, produced and edited; the film received a BAFTA nomination for Best Documentary. Subsequent credits include the narrative features Megan Leavey (2017), Our Friend (2019) and I.S.S. (2024), and the documentary The Grab (2022).
