SYNOPSIS:
Trinity O'Brien is a pretty college co-ed majoring in journalism. She's also a champion swimmer.But her real love is animals. So when spring term ends and she gets a chance to travel to St.Paul Island, in the Pribilof Islands,where the United States has an annual fur seal slaughter, she decides to spend her summer vacation writing about it and helping to end it.

She soon discovers that, underneath our veneer, humans are the most savage
animal of all. She finds most of the local natives indifferent to the suffering of the seals
and angry at her and others protesting the slaughter. In the days before the clubbing is to begin, Trinity befriends one particular male seal, a beautiful albino she names Chompers, and his pod.

As the time for the slaughter nears, she realizes she must come up with a plan to save them. When the clubbing begins, Trinity's horrified by it and even more determined to save them. Trinity gains their trust by feeding them fish. She teaches Chompers to follow her. He's the leader of his pod, and the others will follow him.

Trinity persuades four male friends to help her kidnap Chompers and his pod from a holding pen,where they await death. The hasty plan is to swim them across the bitterly
cold Bering Sea to George Island, where they will be safe, forty-seven miles away. Wearing a survival suit, Trinity will swim the seals, and the men will accompany her in a boat.

Trinity and the others stage a daring morning rescue of Chompers and his pod and fifty other seals, and all the seals follow Trinity to the sea. She leads the seals on what for her is a life-threatening swim. It's a grueling escape in freezing water, past sharks, and before they're even halfway there, a nineteen foot shark attacks and disables the boat.

Trinity continues on, suffering from hypothermia and delusions. How can she possibly make it? But she does. When she and the seals near George, eighteen hours after they
began, the seals are safe, but she is near death. There is a role reversal, with Chompers her only hope for survival…she climbs on his back and holds on. Hours later she is rescued by Peter, a fiery Russian helicopter pilot, who is part of the escape ... he risks an international incident when he flies her to a hospital in Russia. After recovering in Russia, Trinity has a reunion with Chompers at George Island, on the beach where she left him, one wonderful moment with the seal who saved her life.

It's an exciting, yet very moving, story about humans and seal clubbing, and the cruelty humans accept toward animals and each other, and the excuses we make for it. The story is semi-autobiographical, based on my visit to a 1983 harvest.

SYNOPSIS:
What makes family so mean that they would betray their own flesh and blood? George is stuck in the jungles in a war he wants no part of. His brothers are killed because of it. His overbearing mother wants him away from the girl he loves and does what no mother would do. His best friend urges him to fight the enemy. His magistrate dad is a wimp. His religious sister-in-law secretly desires him and does the unthinkable. Everyone wants what's best for him. But, what he wants, he can't have.

George is determined to return to his girl. He misses her. He dreams of kissing her and marrying her. Soldiers are everywhere ready to kill him. He's all alone and his only sanctuary is the jungles of Sandakan that could also consume him. Can he stay alive, when every step he takes could be his last?

The film opens in Australia, Sydney's Burwood Park, where old George and his wife come upon a war memorial that takes them back 60 years--to their hometown of Sandakan in British North Borneo where, during WWII, over 2,000 Australian and British soldiers were imprisoned by the Japanese.

The story is a flashback to George as a 17-year-old Eurasian boy falling in love with his Chinese girlfriend, Ching. The backdrop of war with Australian and British prisoners of war in Sandakan's infamous Mile 8 camp and the Death March during 1943-1945 are based on real eyewitness accounts from the local people of Sandakan who come into contact with them, are seen through George and Ching's character.

As war ensues, so does love--with a deadly mix of hate, betrayal, lust, jealousy, grief and vengeance. In a world where the cultural tradition of arranged marriage must be upheld, families do what is best for their sons and for their daughters. Can love endure the tyranny of war and tradition?

When Ivan confronts his boss and the town with these truths, repercussions immediately occur. Ivan is thrown out of his house, loses his job, and faces a trial for slander. Lies about his behavior spread through the town like wildfire. Provoked to strike a particularly snide wastrel from the elite class, Ivan ends up at the police station with more charges against him.

Kaminski, a young, idealistic lawyer in love with Ivan’s daughter, and Jadviga, an ostracized, free-thinking actress with whom Ivan becomes lovers, are the only townspeople to take his side. The smuggler Valent is a rebel in his own right and ends up in Ivan’s cell and soul mate in prison.

Ivan soon finds that the more he speaks the truth the greater the danger to his life, as the powers controlling the town also control the courts and the press. It is too late for Ivan to return to his passive state—truth or death are his only choices as he witnesses the frail edge between reality and unreality in prewar Europe disappear.

Based on Nobel Prize-nominee Miroslav Krleza’s 1937 novel, On the Edge of Reason, MAD DOGS is a riveting story about the universal problem of power and corruption; the tide of evil that prevails until the counter-force of justice sweeps in to set things right. Keen wit and irony distinguish the protagonists in this multilayered story with outstanding roles for Ivan, Jadviga, Kaminski, Valent, and the villains Marko, Domacinski, and Judge von Rugvay.