In the winter of 2024, Da Bai—a captive beluga whale in Hangzhou, China—sank to the bottom of his cold tank. A ghost from the water. A giant of the sea. A being so complex and agile, ended up unceremoniously on a waste hill behind the marine park, where he spent his entire life in confinement. Beginning with the testimony of Da Bai’s last keeper, a gripping story of loss, grief, love, and the human need to remember something more-than-human was unearthed from six feet under.
How Do You Bury A Whale is an experimental documentary piece that digs into our relationship with those majestic and ephemeral marine lives that we trap in captivity. Weaving together archival materials, sonic experiments, and embodied poetic storytelling, we try to probe into the unfathomable death that haunts us forever. How do we process a loss for which we are both responsible and victim? How do we carry on our human lives with ecological grief and ethical failure that we cannot bear? And can we find hope in the act of burying?