Nick Pelios
Freediver, Creator
Share this on
Nick Pelios
Freediver, Creator
National Geographic film maker, photographer and story teller Jahawi Bertolli grew up in Kenya. As a kid, he used to play endlessly by the ocean, but as he grew older he witnessed that things were taking a change for the worst. So, he decided to do something about it.
"My name is Jahawi Bertolli, I’m an underwater filmmaker but also a wildlife photographer. I grew up in Kenya and spent a lot of time with big cats, but my real passion is the ocean and that's what I've been focusing my time on now. I was blessed to grow up in such a diverse and beautiful country as Kenya and spent time on the coast as a child. It was the funnest thing - get up early in the morning, run to the beach and go snorkeling and see what was going on at low tide, check out all the little rock pools. It was an idyllic kind of upbringing. But as I grew older, I realized it was changing. When I went out, all the little things I used to go out and see were disappearing and to the point now it was almost like a barren wasteland. And I was like “there is so much emphasis on the terrestrial wildlife in Kenya but no one is really looking at the oceans".
"Huge changes are happening in our oceans but there's also huge amounts of stories to be found. So I started looking into ocean stories and came across this incredible story about a humpback whale migration that comes through the Kenyan coast and I was like “I have to make a film about this” so with the support of National Geographic we went outside to try and film the first sequences of humpback whales in Kenya and as all good wildlife does, they didn't show up that year".
"This process has been very exciting because we were working with communities. Wildlife is one side, but there are people who have been living with these animals and if you really want to find the stories, you need to work with these communities. So, we went into these villages and we were interviewing old fishermen and we were trying to find out old stories of humpback whales and we did find some incredible stories, but actually what we found was a much bigger project. We found that we could actually tell the story of the changes in the Indian Ocean from the stories of these old fishermen and through their eyes".
"When you go into a community and you want to create educational material, you have to understand this is their story and they're the best people to tell it. So we've been now working on this film, we've been interviewing fishermen and we're now trying to tell the story of the change through the eyes of these really old, incredible fishermen".
"We're trying to get people to connect with their ocean and it's one thing to parachute in and film and then come back with a polished film, but really it's their story, we're there to listen, to understand how they view their environment. When working on educational films, it's about including the communities you're working in, to be part of the process and what that does is, it creates a feeling of ownership of this film. People get truly excited about it".
"I mean, we've been working with fishermen who've never seen underwater and all of a sudden they see these clips that we show them, they are so excited. Now, they'll come back and they've filmed something on their phone and they send us these little clips and they're like “what's this” you know, and through this, we got the first ever footage of Risso's dolphins confirmed in Kenya's waters from a fisherman. On top of that, the actual community in the Lamu archipelago has come together, because they want to set up a community marine protected area of Lamu, because they see the benefit of the ocean and they've fallen in love with it. We're actually seeing communities really taking the step and that creates such hope within me - I think it's fantastic".