Skip to content

Anti-salmon farm film takes award

Panned by the industry, Salmon Confidential documentary was a hit at Vancouver International Film Festival

A controversial anti-salmon farming documentary, produced by a Campbell River filmmaker, earned an award last Friday at the Vancouver International Film Festival.

Twyla Roscovich’s “Salmon Confidential” won the Most Popular Canadian Environmental Documentary Award at the festival.

The film has been called “unscientific and biased” by the salmon farming industry, and Roscovich readily admits she’s a supporter of wild salmon.

The 70-minute documentary was first screened in Campbell River last spring and has since been taken on the road to more than 40 communities.

In the film, Roscovich follows Alexandra Morton’s 2012 investigation of wild salmon deaths which Morton attributes to European viruses associated with salmon farming.

Roscovich is the one-woman film crew who follows Morton’s trips to court, remote rivers, government offices, Vancouver grocery stores and sushi restaurants.

Roscovich grew up in Campbell River and graduated from Carihi.

Secondary in 1996, and immediately went out and started filming killer whales for the BBC.

Later, she got to know Morton, a biologist and activist who supports wild salmon and condemns salmon farming in coastal waters.

Roscovich is currently filming and recently told the Globe and Mail that she was unable to make the screening of Salmon Confidential in Vancouver. She is planning a follow-up to the documentary.