Room Mate
A decades-long mission to free Lolita, a captive orca held in America's smallest whale tank, unites Indigenous leaders, experts, and activists. As her health declines, they race against time to reunit…
Room Mate
A decades-long mission to free Lolita, a captive orca held in America's smallest whale tank, unites Indigenous leaders, experts, and activists. As her health declines, they race against time to reunite her with her wild family. RESIDENT ORCA tells the unfolding story of a captive whale's fight for survival and freedom. After decades of failed attempts to bring her home, an unlikely partnership between Indigenous matriarchs, a billionaire philanthropist, killer whale experts, and the aquarium's new owner take on the impossible task of freeing Lolita, captured 53 years ago as a child, only to spend the rest of her life performing in the smallest killer whale tank in North America. When Lolita falls ill under troubling circumstances, her advocates are faced with a painful question: is it too late to save her? From first time feature documentary directors, Sarah Sharkey Pearce and Simon Schneider and Executive Producers Squil-le-he-le (Raynell Morris) and Tah-Mahs (Ellie Kinley) of Lummi Nation, this intimate and heart-breaking narrative explores our relationship to the natural world through a captive whale and the attempts to return her to her wild family. As the effort to free Lolita approaches success, her life comes to mirror our own human failures while calling us to step forward into a new understanding of nature and our role within it.
Room Mate
Drama
Film Details
A decades-long mission to free Lolita, a captive orca held in America's smallest whale tank, unites Indigenous leaders, experts, and activists. As her health declines, they race against time to reunite her with her wild family. RESIDENT ORCA tells the unfolding story of a captive whale's fight for survival and freedom.
After decades of failed attempts to bring her home, an unlikely partnership between Indigenous matriarchs, a billionaire philanthropist, killer whale experts, and the aquarium's new owner take on the impossible task of freeing Lolita, captured 53 years ago as a child, only to spend the rest of her life performing in the smallest killer whale tank in North America. When Lolita falls ill under troubling circumstances, her advocates are faced with a painful question: is it too late to save her? From first time feature documentary directors, Sarah Sharkey Pearce and Simon Schneider and Executive Producers Squil-le-he-le (Raynell Morris) and Tah-Mahs (Ellie Kinley) of Lummi Nation, this intimate and heart-breaking narrative explores our relationship to the natural world through a captive whale and the attempts to return her to her wild family. As the effort to free Lolita approaches success, her life comes to mirror our own human failures while calling us to step forward into a new understanding of nature and our role within it..