“The film Sockeye Salmon. Red Fish is finished thirteen years
after I first had the idea to tell the story of Kamchatka’s wild salmon.
I first arrived in the Kamchatkan wildlife sanctuary in 2007, with plans to
shoot this film. I soon learned that shooting in those conditions
was impossible. The scale of poaching on Kurile Lake shocked me. Every
night, poaching groups poached over 500 kilos of sockeye caviar! It was
dangerous to be near the areas most rich in fish. With this new
knowledge the idea to film a documentary about sockeye, right next to
those who were illegally eradicating it, seemed overly bold. I had to put
away the camera for a couple of years and join the task force that fought
poaching.
Today, thousands of tourists from all over the world visit Kuril Lake,
poaching has finally become history, and the film about sockeye salmon
has become a reality.”
Dmitry Shpilenok
SOCKEYE SALMON RED FISH
KAMCHATKA STORY IN FOXES
Power, creation, self-sacrifice...
The wild salmon of the Southern Kamchatka – ozernovskaya salmon
– creates a paradise here. An unthinkable abundance
of food for the birds and animals, and a source of surplus
income for humans. It is an inexhaustible resource that feeds
millions of people on the planet, renewed every year! Sockeye salmon,
taking nothing in return, lets every other living thing flourish.
It's a natural wonder. But how long will it last? For how long will there
still be paradise in Southern Kamchatka? One mistake could bring us to an
unbelievable fact: we will be responsible for exhausting an inexhaustible resource!

Sockeye Salmon. Red Fish is not a pretty story with a happy ending... It's a warning.
Poaching is not the only thing that threatens the
consistent life cycle of wild salmon. The fish are threatened by
construction of gas pipelines, dams, mines, as well as biased overestimation
of the region’s safe fishing capacity. In Kamchatka and other regions of the world
relying on fish, fish is the basis of all commerce, an inexhaustible source
of income and great temptation! These sorts of places attract people and fuel
their greed. There is a great risk that in their pursuit of profit everything
will be irrevocably lost: fish and hundreds of other species, in
addition to the utopian corners of our planet that they live in.
The film Sockeye Salmon. Red Fish is about the wild salmon of
Kamchatka - but it is only one illustration of a worldwide problem. In the USA
and Japan, schools of wild salmon are also under threat. Experience of
restoring wild salmon in American, Japanese, and Canadian rivers has shown
that expenses greatly surpass their results. The only way to save wild
salmon is to stop their natural numbers from dwindling.
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