HERO OF NEW FILM, “BIG MIRACLE,” TO SPEAK
AT STONINGTON OPERA HOUSE
Special screening of new film part of Wings, Waves, & Woods Weekend
STONINGTON – Opera House Arts (OHA) is proud to announce that Cindy Lowry, the fictionalized subject of the new feature film, Big Miracle, will be the featured post-movie guest speaker Saturday, May 19 during a special weekend of screenings of the film May 18-20 at the Stonington Opera House. Lowry, a Greenpeace representative in Alaska who in 1988 persuaded the Americans and Russians to free a family of three trapped gray whales, is played in the movie by Drew Barrymore and comes to the island as a long-time associate of fellow environmentalist and Opera House Arts board member Cherie Mason.
The evening presents an opportunity for fishermen and people from all backgrounds to hear Lowry speak about her experiences, and to discuss our active relationships with the ocean and the public policies, agencies, and organizations that impact these relationships. OHA is screening the film as part of Deer Isle-Stonington’s Wings, Waves, & Woods Weekend. All showings are at 7 p.m.
Inspired by actual events that captured the hearts of people across the globe as reported live on major network news, the film co-stars Ted Danson and John Krasinski, and is an engaging, PG-rated work-against-the clock-and-the-odds action movie. “The race to save the whales…comes with a family-friendly reach-across-the-aisle message: When people put aside politics and ill will, they can accomplish something they could never manage alone,” wrote the New York Times in reviewing the film.
Cindy Lowry initiated the rescue after a biologist called to see if Greenpeace could lend an icebreaker to get the whales out of a swiftly-forming, early ice mass near the U.S.’s northernmost city, Barrow. Since Greenpeace had never had an icebreaker, Lowry moved into gear, trying to track down the Coast Guard icebreaker through first the governor’s office and then NOAA and the state fisheries department. Lowry, who was working on the role of oil companies and overfishing in Alaska at the time, didn’t hesitate to call the oil companies, whalers, the Alaska National Guard, and finally Moscow—just as the Cold War, if not the ice, was breaking. Luckily for the whales, Lowry was remarkably persuasive and within 36 hours she, too, was on her way to Barrow. The story, portrayed in the film as a romance on ice between humans, “was a romance with me and the whale,” Lowry reported.
Lowry currently directs an organization she founded, Oceans Public Trust Initiative, an Earth Island Institute project dedicated to protecting the public trust, and has written about projects including the Cape Wind offshore wind project proposal. “I just hope the movie will make people aware,” she said in a February interview with The Guardian newspaper. “The reality is that the oceans which we return whales into these days are in much worse shape now than they were just 20 years ago.”
For more information and a full schedule of events, please go to www.operahousearts.org or call 207-367-2788.
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