Ep. 305 Documentary Filmmaker of COEXTINCTION Gloria Pancrazi

Todays guest is GLORIA PANCRAZI one of the directors of the award winning documentary Coextinction. The movie is set to release this year in 2022 and is a MUST WATCH for everyone who loves the Orcas and the bioregion of the Pacific Northwest. The documentary movie Coextinction 94 min. long from Coexistence Films covers the story of a mother orca who carried her dead calf for 17 days, as well as the collapse of the ecosystem, injustices against Indigenous people and environmental threats.

COEXTINCTION is a very personal story for Gloria. She grew up fascinated with orcas, watching every documentary, reading every book, and learning everything she could about this animal. When Gloria was 10 years old, she saw orcas for the first time off the coast of British Columbia. "It was clear then that I would spend my life working with them."

Her early career was focused on how to help them in captivity, but she never would have imagined they'd be threatened in the wild as well. In 2017, upon learning the remaining 78 Southern Resident orcas were on the verge of extinction, she moved to a small island in the Salish Sea to monitor them, spending countless hours on the water studying their behavioral patterns. She has witnessed first hand how dire the situation was.

"Through COEXTINCTION, I want people to learn from these orcas. They are incredibly emotionally intelligent beings who celebrate and grieve together. They have no home — they are each other's home. They work together through adversity and have learned how to coexist. They embody the interconnectedness we need to understand, and are intimately connected to the Indigenous communities we need to listen to."