ii. Director's Note
Since I was a child, these animals have moved me in ways humans rarely could
In the mid-2010s, the crisis of elephant and rhino poaching was escalating rapidly. They were dying in such numbers that these majestic giants were on track to go extinct within a decade. I couldn't just passively read about it anymore. What was wrong with humans? How could we be doing this, and what was being done to stop it?
As a filmmaker, I needed to investigate the heart of the matter, so I strapped on a camera and dove headfirst into the black-market supply chain, beginning with who I believed were the perpetrators: the poachers. With the help of local guides, I traveled across South Africa and Mozambique, staying for weeks with local communities and interviewing hundreds of tribesmen, local chiefs, farmers, wildlife conservationists, and government officials. The more I learned, the more it became clear that the illegal wildlife trade was an intricate web so complex that I couldn't imagine how this problem could ever be resolved. And then I learned that, at the same time, across the ocean, a scientist had an idea rooted in synthetic biology that was so revolutionary it promised to definitively break the black-market rhino-horn trade. I followed him and this story for nearly a decade as it moved from the lab to the world.
I went from the assembly halls of the U.N., where policy is negotiated, to the offices of Ministers and NGO presidents, to the villages where those policies actually land, on the people who live alongside these animals. What I found was this: the harm is not in the intent of the people doing the work, but in the shape of the system itself. Its one-size-fits-all approach is doing some of the greatest damage to our ecosystems and to the people who live inside them. Different regions carry different histories, different needs, and different relationships with the land. Conservation has to be built to meet them where they are, not the other way around.
Making this film changed me forever. In how I see the world, in how I see the systems that shape it, and in what I believe it takes for a person to move them. The road is harder than imagined. But it only begins with seeing clearly.
Juliette Marquis
Director · Producer · Writer
