When Doug Bertran was 10, he commandeered the family Super8 film recorder, got together with friends and made his first movies.

They were 3-minute jobs, carefully thought out from beginning to middle to end, and shot tight, because the film was tough to edit, and a cassette cost $5, which the gang bought by pooling their money.

“Silly things, you know,” Bertran said of the subjects filmed in his native Olympia, Wash.

Now he has children of his own, lives in Nevada City — and still makes movies. Bertran's National Geographic documentary, “Orca Killing School,” screens at 11:13 a.m. Saturday at the Nevada City Veterans Memorial Hall, 415 N. Pine St., Nevada City.

It's part of the 8th annual Wild and Scenic Environmental Film Festival, hosted this weekend by the local South Yuba River Citizens League — the largest festival of its kind in the world, and the North American film festival premier for Bertran's latest work.

This time, the subject is deadly serious, but still kids' stuff, in a way: The unique predation technique of whales swimming off the Atlantic Coast of southern Argentina, and how adult whales teach their young the same risky but rewarding methods.

In a home tucked beneath pines and warmed by a wood fire, Bertran's face lights up when recalling his time in 2008 and early 2009 filming what he called “the ultimate predator on the planet.”

Orcinus orca, better known as the killer whale, lives in oceans all over the world. But two family groups, or pods, in a protected area off the Peninsula Valdez in Patagonia, have learned to rush at the beach during high tide in the brief period when sea lion pups are expanding their own knowledge of the sea.

Among the 14 individuals in the two pods, eight hunt in this way — eight in the whole world — and were first observed in 1975.

“Others wait offshore. They share the meal,” Bertran said. “It's such a daring way for them to hunt, because they have to do it at high tide, and they can get stuck if the conditions are not right.”

But sometimes, the adults gather just beyond the beach. That's when killing school opens.

“The big ones come in, and they wriggle around. Then the little ones come in and wriggle around,” Bertran said, wriggling a bit himself. “The older animals teach the younger ones how to play on the beach.”

School for filmmakers

Bertran's own education continued with a film class in high school — he got English credit for it — but veered into a degree in marine biology from Evergreen State University, also in Olympia.

“I was really into animals and wildlife,” said Bertran, who grew up watching “Nature,” on PBS, Marty Stouffer's “Wild America” and that classic, Mutual of Omaha's “Wild Kingdom.”

Out of college, Bertran studied seals for the state of Washington, but returned to Evergreen after two years to make a film about seals, which he sold to the Discovery Channel.

“At that time, most all wildlife films were done out of the U.K.,” Bertran said.

So, armed with a reel of footage of whales and spotted owls, he landed a job with Anglia Television, one of the biggest producers of wildlife documentaries shown in the United States at that time.

Bertran was 25 then and stayed with Anglia for 15 years before branching out on his own. He had filmed killer whales in Puget Sound, eventually sold that theme to “Nature” in 1973, and in the process learned about the astonishing hunters of Peninsula Valdez.

While filming “Eden at the End of the World” about Patagonia wildlife for National Geographic in 2006-07, “I went down to this beach where whales were attacking sea lions, met this orca biologist, pitched it to Geographic, and they said, ‘Yeah, we'd love it.'”

Keeping an eye on things

Orcas held his fascination all those years.

“They're the most spectacular animals,” Bertran said. “They can travel 50 miles in one day, and in that one day, they might attack a southern right whale, cruise the beach, look for seals or sea loins, then go fishing.”

And, it appears, they can make friends.

“One time, we were putting a camera in the surf, and my (production) assistant Segundo (Cerrado) was ankle deep in water,” Bertran said.

It was pup-hunting season, and the whales use their keen hearing to listen for the sound of the pups' fins scratching on the sand when they first push off from the beach.

Kind of like a guy anchoring a camera into the sand.

“All of a sudden, five adults surrounded him — three in front and two on each side,” Bertran said. “They just sat and looked at him for about 30 seconds and all turned and just left.”

Bertran filmed that moment, but it's not in “Orca,” he said. The Chubut province officials who gave permission for the film don't want the 3,000 of eco-tourists who daily visit the area to expect close encounters of the orcinian kind.

To contact City Editor Trina Kleist, e-mail tkleist@theunion.com or call (530) 477-4230.