What if you could biofabricate rhino horn in a lab?
For decades, we have tried to save species X or species Y of wildlife around the world. These species remind us that Mother Nature is all around us, despite our technological innovations. They are part of our connection to our very beginning. Saving them somehow connects us to the beginning of our own species. Despite all our efforts, and all the money poured into resolving this problem, we are still on the road to the extinction of many species. There are many reasons for this. One of them is wildlife poaching.
Horn Maker dives deep into the black market trade of arguably one of the most poached species on the planet: the rhinoceros. Its horn, unique amongst all wildlife, is priced more than gold or cocaine by weight. We meet the people along the chain of this trade: the poachers, the rangers, the carvers, the bureaucrats, and the conservationists who have dedicated their lives to saving wildlife.
Along the way, we come across an uncomfortable but innovative idea. What if all this effort could be flipped on its head by biotechnology? Biotech allows us to work with wildlife DNA without involving animals, but this innovation has never been applied to the black market of wildlife. Matthew Markus, a tech innovator, devises a plan and builds 3D-printing technology to create bio-identical rhino horns that sabotage, saturate, and collapse the illegal trade by exploiting its inherent greed from within.
The idea reverberates across the globe, with some calling him a genius and others calling for his arrest. Horn Maker follows Markus across Africa and Southeast Asia as he introduces his technology and the framework behind it to every player in the chain. Along the way, the film exposes striking contrasts in worldviews, from deeply rooted cultural traditions and trafficking networks to the cutting-edge realm of high-tech innovation. What results is the sheer witnessing of that effort. What it says about our culture. And a glimpse into reality as it is today, as opposed to the spin we have known up to now.
