Souls of the Vermilion Sea is a short documentary about the struggle to save the world's most endangered marine mammal, the vaquita.
This 30-minute film is just one component of a larger outreach and education campaign launched by the Wild Lens Collective in the spring of 2015 with the goal of using media and storytelling to help prevent the extinction of the vaquita.
The film premiered in the spring of 2017, and since then has screened all across the globe, winning numerous awards. The release of the film was accompanied by a unique impact campaign targeting audiences with the greatest ability to have a direct impact on the outcome of the vaquita issue.
Numerous screenings were held in the Northern Gulf of California region that the vaquita calls home, as well as throughout Mexico. Several high profile screenings of the film occured in Hong Kong and other parts of southern China where the demand for the swim bladder of a fish called the totoaba is greatest. It is the illegal trafficking of these swim bladders that is causing the dramatic decline of the vaquita through bycatch.
Souls of the Vermilion Sea continues to screen at festivals and events all across the globe, and is available to stream on Amazon Prime, YouTube, and Vimeo.
In the summer of 2017, the producers of the film, Sean Bogle and Matthew Podolsky from the Wild Lens Collective, were recruited to play a key role in the creation of a new feature length documentary on the same topic. This new film became Sea of Shadows, which had it's world premiere at Sundance Film Festival in January 2019 and will be distributed by National Geographic.