It's not often a documentary is made in response to another documentary, but this year two movies have addressed the 2009 Oscar-winning documentary "The Cove," which was about the capture and killing of wild dolphins in Taiji, Wakayama Prefecture. First-time filmmaker Keiko Yagi's "Behind the Cove" came out last spring, and it is clearly a rebuttal to the American film, which Yagi criticized as being one-sided.

"A Whale of a Tale," the other documentary that responds to "The Cove," had its world premiere at the Busan International Film Festival in South Korea earlier this month. Its director, Megumi Sasaki, a Japanese filmmaker based in New York who previously directed "Herb and Dorothy," may suffer the unfortunate luck of having her film mistaken for Yagi's since it came out afterward. However, the differences between them couldn't be starker.

"I don't want to use the word 'neutral,'" she said during the Q&A following a screening of her film, which was also attended by residents of Taiji, including the mayor. "I think neutrality is impossible — we all have opinions. But I wanted it to be balanced."