John Hopkins is a filmmaker from Prince Edward Island, Canada’s smallest province. Lying in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, P.E.I. is famous for bluefin tuna, which travel north every summer from their breeding grounds in the Caribbean to feed on vast schools of mackerel, capelin and herring. Recently though, those species have been diminishing and the tuna, which are normally shy and wary, seem to have lost their fear of fishermen and appear to be starving.

Like such other celebrated documentaries as Blackfish, The Cove and the late Rob Stewart’s Sharkwater, John Hopkins’ Bluefin is a meditation on the ignorance, greed and carelessness with which we treat the ocean. It asks why our social and political relationships as humans have made us incapable of managing a sustainable harmony with ocean wildlife and what we can do about that.