A theater full of Marin sixth graders were enthusiastically cheering Monday morning after Robert Sams agreed to play the chorus of his Great White Shark Song one last time. See him play the second verse of the song (which is a song sea lions sing as a tribute to their nemesis) in the above video.
It was the end of the screening and Q&A for Shark Riddle, a 30-minute educational film produced by Robert Sams and his sister, Laura Sams in collaboration with the Save Our Seas Foundation. The film launched the California Film Institute’s 5th annual Environmental Youth Forum, which screened films on Monday and Tuesday for roughly 1,000 Bay Area students in grades 1 to 12.
The Sams, of Sisbro Studio LLC, flew to the Bay Area from Portland with their 23-foot-long inflatable Great White Shark for the screening and Shark Riddle presentation. The duo, educational and wildlife filmmakers, star in the short film where they solve a riddle about the correlation of the size of a shark and the size of its teeth.
In the end (spoiler alert!), they discover the largest shark of all, the whale shark, is actually the shark with the smallest teeth. See a preview for the film above.
The brother-sister team is trying to develop empathy and positive feelings toward sharks when it couldn’t be timelier. Earlier this month, great white sharks were selected as candidates for protection under California’s Endangered Species Act, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Other films shown at the festival included the short film Deep Dive: The Langs, which highlights how Marin residents Richard and Judith Lang have been picking up plastic trash from one portion of Kehoe Beach in the Point Reyes National Seashore for more than 10 years and turning it into art installations.
