Gabriela Cowperthwaite makes films out of other people's footage and other people's working lives, and cuts them like thrillers. Blackfish (2013) is the one that mattered: persuasive, gripping and not quite fair. She has since moved into scripted drama, where the question is whether the method survives a screenplay.
Fi1m perspective
The most frightening pictures in Blackfish were not shot for it. They are home video from the stands, the park's own promotional reels, local news, court depositions and a few pieces of security footage that nobody expected the public to see. Gabriela Cowperthwaite's own camera is the least of it: former trainers at kitchen tables and against grey walls, a researcher on a dock, filmed plainly by Christopher Towey and Jonathan Ingalls. The film is in the cutting. She and Eli Despres build each incident slowly, in pieces, and hold the outcome back to the last possible moment.
That is the method, and it is what she is for. She began in television documentary, working for National Geographic, ESPN and Animal Planet after a master's degree in political science, and her first independent feature, City Lax: An Urban Lacrosse Story (2010), was made for ESPN. Blackfish (2013), which she wrote, directed and produced, was the one that reached people. It changed what SeaWorld did next, and it has an effect named after it, which is more than most documentaries get. Since then she has gone into scripted drama: Megan Leavey (2017), the true story of a Marine and her military dog; Our Friend (2019), about a couple facing a terminal illness; and I.S.S. (2023), a thriller set on a space station. Between them came The Grab (2022), a documentary about global resource control that took her seven years.
What works is simple. She picks a real event, finds the people who were closest to it, and lets them say what it was like to be there, so that the questions about captivity and institutional power arrive through the trainers rather than a narrator. And she knows how to make a room tense. We were gripped by Blackfish the way one is gripped by a good thriller, and then, around the third incident built exactly the same way, we caught ourselves and felt slightly used, because it was plain the film had decided what we would think before we sat down. We happen to agree with it. That is not the same as thinking it plays fair, and Jeff Beal's score, which keeps telling us what the footage has already shown, does not help.
The word on her scripted films is that they keep something of the documentary habit, with actors encouraged to ad-lib and scenes allowed to run their own course. We have spent far less time with them than with Blackfish and will not pretend otherwise. She has said that what she loves about documentary is "these little moments that emerge that you can't script because they are so magical." It is an honest thing for a director of fiction to admit, and it points at the open question of the second half of her career: whether the woman who was so good at cutting other people's tape is as good at directing her own. Start with Blackfish, at home, with someone who will argue back.
Biography
Gabriela Cowperthwaite is an American filmmaker who directs, writes, produces and edits documentaries and feature films. She studied political science at Occidental College and the University of Southern California, and began her career making commissioned television documentaries for channels including ESPN, National Geographic and the History Channel.
Her first feature-length documentary, City Lax: An Urban Lacrosse Story (2010), aired on ESPN. She is best known for Blackfish (2013), which she directed, wrote, produced and edited; the film received a BAFTA nomination for Best Documentary. Subsequent credits include the narrative features Megan Leavey (2017), Our Friend (2019) and I.S.S. (2024), and the documentary The Grab (2022).
