When was sharkwater made

Many young filmmakers have been inspired by Stewart to create environmental films of their own. Rob Stewart. Sharks are being fished at the rate of up to — million sharks per year.

Sharks keep our largest and most important ecosystem healthy. Our existence is largely dependent upon theirs. Rob Stewart Sharkwater Foundation. All Rights Reserved. Guns and shark fin traffickers proved to be only a few of many dangers Stewart was to face. At this point he was unsure whether the film would ever be completed. Everything had gone wrong. I would have been arrested if I went back to Costa Rica, and at the end of all this, I had not shot anything underwater.

I had come to shoot an underwater documentary and instead shot this human drama. And now I was going to lose my leg, maybe my life. So much was left to be done. It would have been crazy to give up at that point. What he returned to was far from expected. Protesters lined the streets, demonstrating against shark finning and the illegal fisheries they had exposed with the attempted murder case.

With the world starting to rally for sharks, Stewart was ready to return home to Canada and start editing his movie. Before much of the work could be done, however, Stewart had to get well from the many illnesses acquired while shooting—diagnosed with Dengue Fever, West Nile virus and TB at the same time, there was not much energy available to focus on Sharkwater.

With this lucrative profit, finning for sharks has become more widespread and has helped fuel an underground mafia created to protect the practice. Stewart saw this firsthand while filming on a conservation ship off the coast of Central America.

A daylong battle ensued between Stewart's conservationist ship and the pirate fishing boat — eventually the two ships collided. Shark finning is illegal in Costa Rica, but local authorities detained Stewart, blaming his ship for the encounter. Stewart attributed this to the "Shark Fin Mafia," which has a lot of clout in poorer countries like Costa Rica.

This became abundantly clear to Stewart when he was detained. At one point he ventured off from his detainment and saw tens of thousands of shark fins drying on the roofs, an amount that could translate into millions of dollars.

He wanted to capture this blatant disregard for the law in his documentary. Stewart said sharks are crucial to our survival because they top the ocean's food chain, providing stability to the underwater ecosystem. Ocean life provides 70 percent of the oxygen we breathe and absorbs 70 percent of the carbon dioxide, much of which is emitted by humans.