Now: do you think this is an actual event, a recreated actual event, or fiction? Why? Please share your thoughts in the comments below before reading further.

Here’s my take on it:

I’m pretty sure it’s fiction. And I’m concerned that there’s no text with this film, and no credits at the end–in other words, no accountability. I have no objection to filming heartwarming works of fiction. I love that sort of thing, from Frank Capra’s “You Can’t Take it With You” to “Fried Green Tomatoes” to “Life Is Beautiful” and “Jude”. But all of these are clearly marketed as story, not fact.

In my opinion, this film is specifically designed to make most viewers believe this was a real event.

And I have trouble with that. I feel its “story-ness” should be disclosed, and we should also know who produced the film. I’ll tell you why in a moment, but first, here’s how I reached my conclusion.

Why You Can’t Necessarily Trust Your Eyes

Because I’m trained in journalism and have worked for decades in marketing, I ask hard questions about what is and isn’t real, what people’s motivations or agendas are, and how to filter information based on what’s really going on versus what the speaker or writer or photographer or filmmaker is trying to get you to think is going on.

If you watch any crime movies from the 1930s through 1950s, there’s a pretty good chance that the detective will turn to the suspect and shout, “photos don’t lie!” But here’s the thing: THAT is a lie. Photos can lie in what they choose to include or not. A famous example: the close-ups of a statue of Saddam Hussein being felled by a jubilant (and apparently huge) Baghdad crowd were discredited by wide-angle shots showing only a couple of hundred people, many of them US soldiers rather than locals. The close-ups were propaganda, not truth, even though the photos themselves were real and unretouched. And even in the 1950s–for that matter, even in the 1850s–there was a whole industry around photo alteration. This was true in film as well; ever hear the expression “left on the cutting room floor”? The technologies of photo editing and film editing go back to the earliest days of photography and filmmaking.

In today’s digital world, tools like Photoshop and video editors have transformed those doable but difficult tasks into something incredibly easy, and only an expert will be able to tell. So in this era, we can never trust that a picture or a movie is accurate unless we were there when it was shot. Thus, unfortunately, we need to bring a certain amount of critical analysis when we view any video, any photograph.

And through this lens (pun intended, I confess), when I watch this video, I immediately discard any idea that we’re watching real-time true-story footage.

Why?

7 Reasons Why I Think It’s a Fake

1. It’s waaaay too slick. This is professionally shot and carefully edited, by a skilled camera operator using high-resolution equipment, tripods, and lighting to produce footage as good technically as anything coming out of Hollywood. In real life, this would have been shot on a cell phone, held in a hand that shook at least a little. It’s on a moving boat, after all.
2. Much of the footage is underwater or behind the boat the dog was riding, yet no other boats are visible.
3. When the dog slips off the deck into the water, no people are around. If anyone were filming an actual event, we’d see some kind of rescue attempt, and we certainly would not see the boat blithely continuing away, stranding the pet. At least the crew of the videography boat would get involved.
4. It’s just too convenient that cameras happened to focus on all the key places. And yes, that’s a plural. There was one camera focused on the boat deck and later on the swimming dog, and at least one other one focused underwater at the dolphin and shark.
5. If the shark were really close enough to attack the dog, it would have gone after the dolphin too. Giant sharks don’t care much about “collateral damage.”
6. It strains credulity that the boat would be waiting, unmoving, in still water, just when the dolphin deposits the dog on the tailgate, considering there are plenty of waves in the dolphin-carries-dog footage.
7. I’m suspicious of the site it’s on, something called TopBuzz, which I’ve never heard of. I didn’t notice at first when I clicked the link from a Facebook message that it had a monstrously complex tracking URL, too. Uh-oh! I’ve stripped those tracking codes out of the URL as it’s posted here. To its credit, it doesn’t try to get me to watch all sorts of salacious videos, and a search for complaints brought up only questions about its relationships with content creators, not viewers. And I checked for viruses after having the page open for several hours while writing this, and it came up clean.

I’m also skeptical that this is a later recreation of a true event, although I’d grant that maybe a 10 percent chance. Why? Because much of the footage “documented” events with no witnesses. Unless one of the human crew is fluent in either dog or dolphin language, neither party could have told the story. And the dog might not even know about the shark threat. Certainly, the humans in the boat that drove away would have no idea. Since we don’t know who produced this or how to get in touch with them, we have no way of knowing.

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So instead, I’ll encourage you to hunt up three movies I’ve seen about people who gained power—and used that power to empower others. I saw these over a period of months, and not with the idea that I’d be reviewing them here. So these are mini-reviews.

“RBG,” the movie about “Notorious” Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, covers her amazing backstory using law to promote women’s rights. I hadn’t known much of this history and am in awe of what she achieved long before she was on the Court. I also really like it that she could be friends with superconservative Justice Antonin Scalia; they were opera buddies. I believe that we make peace in part by reaching out to those who think differently than we do.

“Won’t You Be My Neighbor,” the Mister Rogers movie, Watching the show occasionally with my daughter in the late 1980s, it was obvious that he was totally committed to children’s empowerment and acceptance of diversity. But I didn’t know what an activist he was, or about his own background, or about how the show format was shaped by a mix of serendipity and very deliberate choices. I loved discovering his passion to make a difference AND his choice to have as much fun as possible in the process. Fred Rogers was a remarkable man, and many of his messages resonate especially loudly in the past year and a half, to get our country back on track in an era where civility and respect seem to be very little valued.

“The Judge” may be hard to track down but it’s worth the effort. Wonderful documentary (in Arabic, with subtitles) about the first woman family law judge in the Arab world, a Palestinian. Not an easy role for any woman, even in Palestine, where attitudes about women’s education are more enlightened than in some other countries. She had very powerful opponents and even lost her ability to try cases for a while. It was interesting to me that the “courtroom” she presides over is really an office suite, where she meets with individuals and small groups and works out equitable arrangements for alimony, spousal rights of women, etc., all in conformance with Islamic law.

Two of these three are big releases and are getting traction at the box office. These movies proof films with a positive social agenda and without sex or violence can be commercially successful—and I celebrate that. I have no particular objection to sex in movies, but it should be integral to the story and shouldn’t be the reason to go see a film. And I do object to violence, of which there’s far too much on the big screen. If we want people to act positively in the world, our entertainment needs to model that! So it’s great that I can’t think of any violent scene in these three movies at the moment. If there was any, it was mild and in-context enough that it didn’t stick in my memory.

About Shel & This Newsletter
As a green and social change business profitability/marketing consultant and copywriter…award-winning author of ten books…international speaker and trainer, blogger, syndicated columnist – Shel Horowitz shows how green, ethical, and socially conscious businesses can actually be *more* profitable than your less-green, less-socially-aware competitors. His award-winning 8th book Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet was a category bestseller for at least 34 months (and is now available exclusively through Shel), his newest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, has already won two awards and is endorsed by Jack Canfield and Seth Godin. Shel also helps authors/ publishers, small businesses, and organizations to market effectively, and turns unpublished writers into well-published authors.

Shel Horowitz’s consulting firm, Going Beyond Sustainability, is the first business ever to earn Green America’s rigorous Gold Certification as a leading green company. He’s an International Platform Association Certified Speaker and was inducted into the National Environmental Hall of Fame in 2011.

He began publishing his monthly newsletter all the way back in 1997, making it one of the oldest marketing e-zines (it’s changed names a few times along the way).