In 1971, Katy Payne and her husband Roger discovered that whales sing and changed how we see life on Earth. Listening to Whales follows Katy and Chris Clark, who Katy trained on the cliffs of Argentina, as breakthrough discoveries collide with a Navy sonar program killing the whales they love.
SYNOPSIS
In 1971, biologist Katy Payne and her husband Roger released Songs of the Humpback Whale, the first recording of whale song ever made public. It sold over a million copies, ended commercial whaling, and rewrote what we thought we knew about nonhuman intelligence. A young engineer named Chris Clark heard it and abandoned medical school to join the Paynes on the cliffs of Argentina, where he made his first contact with a right whale and never looked back. Over the next three decades, Clark became one of the world's leading marine acousticians, gaining access to the U.S. Navy's global network of underwater microphones, a covert listening system originally built to track Soviet submarines. Using it, Clark made discoveries about whale communication at a scale no scientist had reached before. But the Navy sonar was also filling the ocean with noise, and when dozens of whales began stranding on beaches, Clark found himself at the center of a controversy that went all the way to the Supreme Court. Katy, his mentor, publicly opposed the program and their friendship fractured. It would be elephants, not whales, that brought them back together. In 2002, Katy called. She needed help setting up a recording array in the Central African Republic to study elephant infrasound. Clark flew out immediately. Working together in the forest, they found their way back to each other and to the sense of wonder that had brought them both to science in the first place. Listening to Whales is their story,
ABOUT FILMMAKER(S)
Grace McNally
Grace McNally is a Brooklyn-based documentary director and producer whose work focuses on stories where science, power, and human relationships collide. Her films include Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey (Netflix), Untold: The Shooting at Hawthorne Hill (Netflix), and The Devil's Climb (National Geographic). Listening to Whales is her most personal project to date: a fifty-year story about what happens when a scientific discovery becomes bigger than the people who made it, and what it takes to find your way back to the thing you love.
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