ii. Director's Note
The illegal wildlife trade was not a crime with a culprit.
I have always felt bound to the natural world in a way that borders on spiritual, and to animals most of all. Being among them, surrounded by wild places, is medicine like nothing else. I had been keenly aware of how easily an ecosystem can come apart. What I had never really considered was the places where humans and wildlife actually meet out in the wild, and everything that meeting entails. That changed in the mid-2010s, when the poaching of elephants and rhinos was at its worst. They were being killed faster than they could be born, which meant that they were on a clear path to disappearing entirely from the wild. The majesty of elephants, in particular, has always undone me. It had never occurred to me that their presence on our planet wasn't a given. Science journals and newspapers reported the whole slow catastrophe, but we live buried in alarming, urgent news, and for most people I knew, this was one more thing to worry about and move past. I couldn't move past it. This particular problem struck me as emblematic of everything our own species stood for. What is wrong with us? Are we so careless that we can't see what we're doing to the only home we have? And who is actually trying to make it better? Those were the people I wanted to find. And find them I did.
I started with law enforcement. I wanted to understand how the supply chain actually worked, how the "product" moved from the source through the ports and the transit countries, where it was processed, and whose hands it finally landed in. I interviewed dozens of military officers who trained rangers across Africa, men who protected the reserves at real risk to their lives. I completed a war correspondent training program so I'd have some idea what to do if the violence found me. I was sure I knew who the villains were, and I wanted to hear it from them directly.
So with a local guide, I traveled across South Africa, Mozambique, and Tanzania, staying in rural villages for weeks at a time. I slept in huts beside the families of admitted poachers. I sat with chiefs and tribesmen and asked them to tell me how they saw the world, where the power was in theirs, what they wanted for their children. Back in the cities, I sat with farmers, conservationists, and the officials charged with stopping the very trade I'd come to understand. Many hundreds of conversations in all.
The more people I listened to, the less certain I became. The illegal wildlife trade was not a crime with a culprit. It was a web, tangled through poverty, history, and policy, and I could not see how anyone would ever pull it apart.
Then I heard about a scientist back in America with an idea so audacious it almost sounded made up. Using synthetic biology, he believed he could flood the black market with bioidentical horn, copies no rhino had to die for, and erase the animal from the trade entirely. Think about what that means. If the whole market runs on scarcity, then fooling it with perfect copies breaks the supply chain at its root. Had we been thinking about these criminal networks all wrong? Was he a genius? A fraud? A visionary about to change the world? Once the idea was in front of me, I couldn't see anything more important to understand. I reached out, and after some convincing, we went on the road together. He worked on the science and tried to bring the stakeholders along; I followed with two cameras and questioned every move he made. The story carried me into the U.N. assembly halls where the policy is written, across from ministers and the heads of conservation groups.
What I came to understand is that the hardest thing to put on screen is that there is no villain to point to. The harm is not in the intent of the people doing this work. It is in the shape of the system itself. A single answer, applied everywhere, is doing some of the gravest damage to the ecosystems and the people it claims to protect. Every region carries its own history, its own needs, its own relationship to the land. Conservation has to meet them there. It cannot ask them to come to it.
This film changed me. How I see the world, how I see the systems running underneath it, and what I now believe it takes to move them. The road is longer and harder than I imagined when I started. But every part of it begins the same way. With seeing clearly.
Juliette Marquis
Director · Producer · Writer
