Fish Film Premiere

New Documentary Short Fish Film to Premiere at Camden International Film Festival

Film explores industrial salmon farming in Downeast Maine and the communities working to protect the region’s fisheries and coastal waters

A new documentary short film examining industrial salmon farming in Maine waters and its implications for wild fisheries, coastal communities, and the future of Downeast Maine will premiere at the Camden International Film Festival this September.

The film will premiere at the Camden International Film Festival in Camden, Maine, on September 20, 2026 at 4:00p at The Camden Opera House. 

Filmed in Eastport and Cobscook Bay in March 2026, Fish Film brings together conservation leaders, journalists, authors, and community members to examine the history and growth of the salmon farming industry in Maine and neighboring New Brunswick, as well as growing local efforts to strengthen oversight of open-net-pen aquaculture.

At the heart of the film is a larger question: In a region whose communities, culture, and economy have been shaped by fish and the sea for generations, what kind of future will Maine choose for its coastal waters?

The film features Dwayne Shaw, Executive Director of Downeast Salmon Federation (DSF), whose nearly four decades of work in Downeast Maine have focused on restoring sea-run fisheries and the rivers and watersheds that sustain them. Through fish passage improvements, habitat restoration, conservation hatcheries, land protection, and fisheries monitoring, DSF and its partners have worked to rebuild populations of Atlantic salmon, alewives, smelt, American eel, and other native sea-run fish.

Longtime fisheries journalist Paul Molyneaux, author of Swimming in Circles, also appears in the film. Molyneaux, who first moved to Eastport to work for the Passamaquoddy Tribe, traces the evolution of the region’s salmon farming industry from locally owned operations through periods of disease, industry consolidation, and the concentration of Maine’s salmon farming sector.

The film also features Alex Henry, Code Enforcement Officer for the Town of Lubec, discussing how citizens have used local initiatives to seek additional oversight of salmon aquaculture. Communities across Downeast Maine have increasingly engaged in conversations about the siting and regulation of open-net-pen salmon farms and the role towns can play in decisions affecting their coastal waters.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Catherine Collins and Douglas Frantz, authors of Salmon Wars: The Dark Underbelly of Our Favorite Fish, provide additional perspective on the salmon farming industry and its regulatory history in Maine and New Brunswick.

The film arrives at a consequential moment for Maine. A number of aquaculture lease sites held by Cooke Aquaculture are approaching renewal, creating an opportunity for renewed public discussion about the environmental impacts, regulatory oversight, and long-term future of industrial salmon farming in state waters.

Downeast Maine sits at the intersection of these questions. Its cool coastal waters, powerful tides, rivers, estuaries, and remaining populations of native sea-run fish make the region both ecologically significant and uniquely connected to fisheries. At the same time, decades of public and private investment are being made to restore endangered Atlantic salmon and other migratory fish throughout the region.

Fish Film asks audiences to consider how those restoration efforts intersect with the continued presence of industrial open-net-pen salmon farming along Maine’s coast, and what greater accountability and stewardship could look like for the waters that sustain both wildlife and coastal communities.

Fish Film was shot by Taylor Griffeth and Scott Sells, edited by Emma Baida, and produced by Severine von Tscharner Fleming and Greenhorns, based in Pembroke, Maine.

For more information, visit www.forallthefish.org to learn more about efforts to protect Maine’s wild fisheries and coastal waters.