Great White sharks and North Atlantic gray seals highlight HBO’s Cape Cod-centric documentary “After the Bite,” streaming Wednesday.
“It’s about a community grappling with massive changes to the environment. Issues they are so intertwined with,” director Ivy Meeropol said in a Zoom interview about her sprawling canvas.
Those issues include commercial fishing where sharks hunting seals is one threat. There are newly imposed precautions for swimming, scientific research on the seal population, community meetings to diminish the seals’ protected status.
“The focus is on the Outer Cape, Provincetown, Wellfleet and Truro. It also stretches to Chatham, which is where the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy ,is based, and where the boat goes out to tag sharks for study.
“It’s really a small community with a lot of diverse voices from different sides of issues,” she said. “Not all communities are so tied to the natural environment when massive change is happening. How is the community grappling with those changes?
“And to take it further: How are we as humankind going to grapple with the bigger changes that these portend?
“The experience this small community is having is a microcosm of things happening around the world. We’re seeing it in trying coexistence with wildlife.”
The title refers to what Meeropol sees as the Cape’s Before and After moment with 2018’s shark attack victim Arthur Medici, 26, the state’s first fatality since 1936.
“Without sensationalizing the tragedy of this young man’s death,” Meeropol said, “I want the audience to experience (as much as possible), what it felt like for people who live there to have this young man killed like that: This feeling that life was no longer carefree.
“We all have been experiencing that, obviously with COVID, but I’ve been fearful of climate change’s effects for a long, long time.
“So the idea that things are no longer carefree just resonates. I wanted to unpack the fact that it’s not the sharks themselves that are making it so that our lives are no longer carefree.
“We like to imagine that our life was carefree by just swimming in the ocean. The ocean has always been somewhat dangerous; a lot of wildlife lives in the ocean that we should not be interacting with.
“The sharks’ coming makes it easy to focus on that — and much harder for us as human beings to grapple with these much bigger issues. 2018 did mark a change in the community but it was also a feeling of real divisiveness among people. We would turn on each other because we’re feeling threatened. And that to me speaks to where we are in our society.”
“After the Bite” premieres on HBO Wednesday