Photos of Zach Affolter. Provided by Affolter.

Humboldt State student and animal rights activist Zach Affolter faces a $1 million lawsuit by the Ontario-based amusement park Marineland, after the the business discovered that the teen’s upcoming independent film, Black Water, stars the park’s resident orca, Kiska.

The Niagara Falls Review reports that Marineland filed suit against the 19-year-old San Diego native on May 10, claiming that Affolter used video of intellectual property illegally filmed inside the park without permission by a seasonal employee.

A movie poster for “Black Water.”

Affolter dismissed the the park’s claims during a phone interview with the Outpost.

“I wasn’t expecting anyone to come after me, being that I’m a 19-year-old student making a non-commercial film,” Affolter said. “They are arguing in their lawsuit that it’s a commercial film, which is a completely false accusation. I never went to Marineland. I just collected footage from anonymous online sources.”

Although the short film bears a similar name to the popular documentary Blackfish, which criticized SeaWorld for keeping orcas in captivity, Affolter said the name is not related to that film at all.

Affolter said his film is not a documentary, and describes the project as a short fictional narrative based on Kiska’s actual story, told from the whale’s perspective. The film’s Facebook page describes the plot of Black Water as “the sad story of Kiska, a captive orca at Marineland, Ontario. She struggles to overcome her pain and despair as they rip her apart.”

Although Affolter has been an avid animal activist for most of his life, the San Diego native said he used to dream of being an orca trainer at his hometown SeaWorld.

“Originally I was on the complete opposite end of the spectrum,” Affolter said. “I wanted to be an orca trainer at Seaworld until I had an epiphany and started seeing things in different way. Way before Blackfish or any of this stuff came out, I went to Hawaii and saw the grace and speed of dolphins in the wild. It was far more interesting than what I saw in captivity. That’s what made me want to be a marine biologist and come to Humboldt State.”

Since then, Affolter has been praised by PETA as a “champion for cetacean rights,” and has received a Libby Award from the animal rights organization’s youth division for his active participation in protests around Southern California.

Because Affolter can not afford to fight a legal battle on a teenage college student’s budget, he’s started a GoFundMe account, where he’s raised nearly $4,000 in just two days. The film was scheduled to be released on May 20, but Affolter still plans to release the film on a later date, regardless of the pending litigation.

“I think it’s just a scare tactic to bully me into not releasing the film,” Affolter said. “Marineland isn’t even directly mentioned in the film. The whale’s name is mentioned a few times in the dialogue, but that’s the only clue.”

The marine biology major said he started working on the movie a year ago as a passion project that also served as a way for him to deal with his own depression.

“[The movie] is beyond the scope of a cetacean in captivity,” Affolter said. “It’s sad that we live in a world where students can’t express their thoughts. I’m not saying Marineland is trying to abuse [the orca] or that the trainer don’t love her or anything like that. But we as a society need to ask ourselves if what we see is right before change can occur.”