#playingwithsharks

Playing with Sharks is a documentary directed by Sally Aitken, an Emmy-nominated director who is known for her bold collaborations. This documentary film takes a look into Valeire Taylor’s extraordinary life. Valeire Taylor and her husband Ron Taylor, who is now deceased, were known for their conservation efforts and film work surrounding sharks. This film takes a deep dive into Valeire’s work and the challenges she has faced as a conservationist. 

As a child Valeire had polio and was kept in a facility for those with polio. She was to be kept there until she had learned to walk again. During her stay at the facility, she read books such as “Treasure Island” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”. Both of these books greatly inspired her as she states in the film and likely shaped her to be interested in having her own great adventure. Before Valeire began a career in shark conservation, she was a spearfisher and participated in fish competitions. From the very beginning she was one of the best, she had to be in order to be taken seriously by her male counterpart. However, there were a few occurrences where she was not allowed to be involved in activities. For instance, there was one shark expedition where she was not allowed to go, but her husband was. While on the trip the other men had killed five sharks and her husband, Ron, then vowed to never kill another wildlife animal again. Around the same time, Valerie had also come to the same conclusion and had only killed one shark by herself.

The couple then decided to stop participating in fishing competitions and decided to focus on making a living off of film. It was a lot harder to make money off a film, so they often would film dangerous shots for movies. The most popular film they ever worked on is “Jaws”. Despite this film being completely fictional, people actually believed that sharks were evil creatures. The film caused people all over the world to start killing sharks, despite Valerie going on talk shows to inform them that sharks are not dangerous.

After filming for Jaws, Valeire went on to do more conservation work. For instance, due to the amount of people killing sharks Valerie wrote to politicians to protect grey nurse sharks and the Ron and Valerie Taylor Marine Park was created. The Ron and Valerie Taylor Marine Park protects all wildlife in the Neptune Islands. At one point, Valerie dressed herself in chainmail and put bait around her in order to attract a shark and attempt to get it to bite her. The goal was to prove that sharks do not have a powerful bite and only use their sharp teeth to hurt their prey. Not only were they successful at proving this, they were able to capture video evidence of the event.

This film used both new and older film footage, the older film footage was film that Ron Taylor had preserved. The old 16mm footage has videos of Valerie, behind the scenes footage of Jaws, and of course footage of sharks. The film also had used audio clips of Ron since he passed away before this documentary began filming. There were guests who were interviewed about their experiences with Valerie.