Call Of The Ancient Mariner

Winner “Best of the Festival” at Charleston Film Festival
Mariner is coming to PBS! Find TV listings under Screenings and the DVD is available at Buy the DVD

ABOUT

CALL OF THE ANCIENT MARINER is a new documentary film by David Weintraub taking the viewer on a fascinating exploration of sea turtles and human culture. Thousands of cultures have been captivated by this iconic creature making the turtle their totem, their deity, their inspiration for wisdom, fertility and longevity. As a result, man’s first writing was done on the back of a turtle shell, the first known coin has a sea turtle on it. The Maya based their sophisticated astronomical based on the scutes of a turtle. Mariner documents these spellbinding historical connections and what they mean for us today and how they inform our current conservation efforts.

Sea turtles are the world’s only living dinosaur that have graced our planet for over 150 million years. Although they’ve survived ice ages and mass extinctions their biggest test – surviving mankind – is still to be determined. Every sea turtle is endangered and some severely so. We have much to learn from turtles and this, I believe, is one of the leading reasons we seem to have this innate connection with these creatures. As we study our connections with this iconic creature, may we become better stewards of the ocean and the land that shelters them and us . . .

This project started as a personal quest to learn about sea turtles along the coast of South Carolina and it became a study of ecology, environmentalism, culture and human nature. The documentary film explores the turtle’s quest, parallel to our own, as we both learn to share this increasingly smaller blue marble in the universe.

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