South Asia’s elephant tourism is booming, but does it have a dark side? This documentary sheds some light on the so-called “ethical elephant parks” while discovering first-hand how elephant ridings and shows are experienced by the elephants, as well as meeting the people who are working to create better solutions all round.

The Börzsöny forest in Northern Hungary is filled with stories. Here grass frogs, eagle owls, peregrine falcons, fire salamanders, foxes, wild cats, red deers, wild orchids, beech trees and others ebb and flow with the seasons and illustrate the director’s motto: “nature around us opens a gateway to  nature within us”.

This is the story of the most charismatic inhabitant of the most beautiful island of Brazil: the spinner dolphins from Fernando de Noronha. Famous for their amazing acrobatics, in which spinners may raise more than 3 metres above the water and spin up to 7 times around their bodies, the dolphins are true ocean wanderers. They live in tropical open waters around the world, and some may spend years without ever seeing land. But a population of these dolphins, the Noronha Spinners, behave very differently. Almost every day they visit Noronha and gather in an area considered as the most visited bay by dolphins in the world. But why do these oceanic specialists seem to need the sheltered waters of Noronha so much?

This film reveals, in intimate details, the behaviour of the Noronha spinners, showing what these dolphins do in the sheltered island waters and the spectacular acrobatics they perform. The relationship between the dolphins and the island of Noronha, however, is now threatened by anthropogenic changes and by the growth tourism is bringing to the island, and a dedicated group of researchers created a project in the attempt to study the dolphin’s behaviour and work toward the conservation of the Noronha Spinners.