In an effort to answer these questions, a team of self-professed “shark nerds,” including a dive instructor, science educator, citizen scientist and wildlife filmmaker, came together to create Jawsome: Canada’s Great White Sharks, the newest documentary from CBC’s The Nature of Things. 

Produced by Vancouver-based River Road Films, the same production company behind the 2023 Emmy-Award-winning Island of the Sea Wolves, Jawsome explores what’s happening with great white sharks in Atlantic Canada — and the connection humans have with this elusive species. 

Director, co-writer and co-producer Sonya Lee spoke with Canadian Geographic about what went into the making of this documentary and what she hopes viewers will take away from the film.

On where the inspiration for Jawsome came from

I was living in Halifax at the time. There is a Halifax Instagram community page called halifax noise (@hfxnoise). I started seeing a lot of people’s posts of seeing great white sharks from the beach or from their boat, and I just thought it was really interesting to read the comments section because it ranged from, “Oh my god, this is so cool,” to, “Oh my god, this is terrifying, I am never going in the water”  to: “Oh, it’s not a big deal, they’ve always been here.” 

It was really interesting from a storytelling perspective, but then I was like, “We can never film them.” So, I kind of put it aside. Then my friend, who’s a wildlife filmmaker, Nick Hawkins, who’s also a Canadian Geographic photographer and a Nat Geo Explorer sent me a video of him filming sharks. He went out and tried it, and he’s like, “I think we can do this.” And I was like, “Oh my god, I think we can.”

On the biggest challenges faced during filming

Firstly, it was extremely challenging to film them. I guess we went in thinking that if we put a food source in the water near places where you know there are white sharks, they are going to come to the boat, and that was not the case. There were so many factors that went into having the right conditions for filming, and we just had terrible weather that year. It was very windy, and we had multiple big hurricanes come through. Hurricane Fiona hit the year we were filming. So, it was very challenging in that way.

The most interesting thing I learned was that I really wanted to focus on people’s relationship with sharks and not sensationalize and give the “large, scary human-eating machine” kind of characteristics to a shark. I really wanted to go into the different ways that we can interpret a shark’s behaviour. They are very cautious, they are very curious. They come in and “boop” the bait with their fins or their nose before doing anything.

There are so many different kinds of relationships people have had with sharks over thousands of years in Nova Scotia and on the East Coast, and [we were] able to delve more into that and show that people have always had a relationship here. This is not new, and these are some of the ways that we can exist together with sharks.