storyline entertainment

Storyline Entertainment and Acqua Film present

A Whale of a Tale

A Fanciful Feature Documentary

By Peter Lynch
A World Premiere At The

Toronto International Film Festival
September 2004

Take one self-consciously world-class city and a seemingly-innocuous "found object," mix in an absurd broth of characters and agendas, and you have Peter Lynch's

A Whale of a Tale, a fanciful documentary that speaks to our gullibility and desire to believe tall tales.

A Whale of a Tale will have its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). This marks Lynch’s fourth feature and fifth film premiere showing at TIFF.

In A Whale of a Tale, the said object is a whale bone, incongruously discovered in the '80s under the streets of Toronto - a thousand kilometers from the ocean - during the construction of a streetcar extension from Union Station to the waterfront. A lover of bones and artifacts, Lynch decides to go “in search of a fine boisterous something.”

As if awakened from hibernation, the bone would soon come alive as the center of a media storm. The story encompasses an eclectic range of references from Moby Dick to PT Barnum to Jacques Cousteau. The sometimes-hilarious cast of characters drawn to it would include a wishful paleontologist, an obsessed debunker, some wildly unscientific journalists, a police "bone expert" and an erstwhile circus owner.

Once humans get involved anything can happen.

But as Ishmael in Moby Dick says; “Man is just the architect not the builder.”

Filmed on location in Nantucket, New Bedford, Pittsfield, Cape Cod, New Brunswick, Grand Manan Island, Nova Scotia, Ile Verte St. Lawrence, Robson Bight, Telegraph Cove, B.C., Niagara Falls Ontario, Toronto, and Ann Arbor, Michigan, this “shaggy whale story” is the latest stream-of-heightened-consciousness from Lynch, a Canadian auteur whose style-heavy approach is often compared by critics to that of Werner Herzog. It's an absurdist tale that evokes Lynch's earlier Quixotic adventures like Project Grizzly - in which he chronicled the Ahab-like quest of a Canadian inventor to create a suit that could withstand an attack by North America's largest carnivore.

This time around for Lynch it’s a playful tale of obsession, rendering a journey beyond the travelogue. “An illuminating lyrical eclectic range of stories, narrative asides, and purposeful pleasurable diversions for diversion sake,” says Lynch, “it is a layered complex tale that twists and turns and meanders in various tangents celebrating the power of story telling. The idea that it starts out a mystery and ends as a discovered new myth is rhapsodic and poetic and is what drove me in the first place with this tale.”

The landscape that we encounter in this Lynch Tale is the wilderness of the ocean and the archipelagoes of the imagination.

Whale of a Tale is co-produced by sought-after producer Ed Barreveld (whom Lynch worked with on Project Grizzly and who produced the award winning feature, Aftermath: The Remnants of War); Producer for the NFB is Peter Starr (Hardwood, Spirits of Havana, The Herd) the shooter is Stan Denniston (well known artist and photographer); and the editor is Lynch's long time collaborator and wife, Caroline Christie (who, aside from Lynch's films has edited Michael Moore's The Awful Truth, Elida Schogt's Zyklon Portrait, Comedy Central's Insomniac with Dave Attell and The Comedy Network's Puppets Who Kill).

A Whale of a Tale is Produced by Acqua Film and Storyline Entertainment in Co-production with the National Film Board of Canada, in association with CBC Newsworld, iFC: The Independent Film Channel and with the participation of Star Choice Communications Inc., the Canadian Independent Film and Video Fund, the Canadian Television Fund created by the Government of Canada and the Canadian Cable Industry CTF: Licence Fee Program and the Canadian Film or Video Tax Credit.

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Contact: Ingrid Hamilton, 416-802-2079 ingrid@gat.ca