Waimea Ocean Film Festival - The Last Animals
The Last Animals follows the conservationists, scientists and activists battling poachers and criminal networks to save elephants and rhinos from the edge of extinction.
Interview with Writer/Director/Producer Kate Brooks
Watch The Last Animals on Prime Video, iTunes and Tubi
Congratulations! Why did you make your film?
In 2010 after embedding with a medevac unit at Kandahar Airfield in Afghanistan as a photojournalist, I went to Kenya on a long-planned vacation. It was in the Maasai Mara that I was able to heal from some of the inhumanity I had witnessed: countless troops having their limbs blown off by IEDs and Afghan children being erroneously bombed by coalition forces.
Seeing a herd of elephants cross my eye line for the first time reminded me that in spite of all the human destruction on the planet, there is still some natural order which ultimately led me to want to protect it. A couple of years later I applied to the Knight Wallace Fellowship at the University of Michigan and was accepted as the Ford Environment, Transportation and Technology Fellow. I saw stories trickling in about the poaching crisis, but the issue was largely underreported then. When I learned of an elephant massacre on the border of Chad in which over 80 elephants were gunned down, I felt I had no choice but to pick up my cameras to help bring attention to the crisis.
Imagine I’m a member of the audience. Why should I watch this film?
The Last Animals is a beautiful and dynamic film – it’s a sweeping global story that takes the viewer to places they’d otherwise never go and introduces them to extraordinary people on the frontlines of conservation. There’s cutting edge science, a CSI crime component, behind the scenes access, raw emotion and much to be learned about the illegal wildlife trade, which is an international problem and should concern anyone who cares about the planet.
How do personal and universal themes work in your film?
I was a war photographer who found peace and healing in the beauty of wildlife. In trying to tell their story, I found myself back in the thick of conflict. The Last Animals is the first film I directed. As an emotional experience it reminded me of becoming a photographer – in both there was a process of self-realization. You are not a director until you have directed a film, just like you are not a professional photographer until you start to publish your work.
How have the script and film evolved over the course of their development?
The Last Animals is an unscripted documentary, which means that as the director I followed story lines, not always knowing how they would evolve. I pursued them based on my gut journalistic instinct. While the Northern White rhinos were referenced in my very first grant proposal for seed funding, I was not originally anticipating that they would be featured as individuals throughout the movie but I was fascinated by their story and started to care for them as individuals. For a time I felt like I was making two movies at once, but the national park where Northern whites went extinct in the wild a decade ago is the same place where there is a true intersection between the wildlife trade and terrorism and so the film became about both elephants and rhinos.
What type of feedback have you received so far?
The film has gotten tremendous amount of press, strong reviews and screened at more than 30 festivals around the world - and is continuing to do so.
Has the feedback surprised or challenged your point of view?
It’s bizarre to have made a film that is traversing the planet that has yet to go into full distribution. People regularly ask why it hasn’t yet been picked up and are equally perplexed based on the strength and power of the film; I have no answer.
Who do you need to come on board (producers, sales agents, buyers, distributors, film festival directors, journalists) to amplify this film’s message?
I made the film without aligning with any one particular conservation group but in the end all of the major international NGOs working on conservation and wildlife trafficking have endorsed and embraced the film. The one missing component now is distribution. Demand and praise for the film continues to be received from across the world. The film needs to be seen far and wide – which is my great wish for 2018.
What type of impact and/or reception would you like this film to have?
Beyond raising general awareness about wildlife trafficking, my greatest hope is that the film will help close down the remaining ivory markets in the world and lead to stronger wildlife trafficking legislation. Over the last few months we’ve had impact screenings in Hong Kong, Taiwan and the UK where ivory bans are pending.
What’s a key question that will help spark a debate or begin a conversation about this film?
Why is anyone in the world still trading in ivory and rhino horn?
What other projects are the key creatives developing or working on now?
I’ve been pretty busy promoting the film since its premiere at Tribeca. I’m in talks with a variety of people about directing some other projects and also about producing one, but am also excited about picking up my cameras again and photographing.
Interview: January 2018
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The Last Animals
The Last Animals follows the conservationists, scientists and activists battling poachers and criminal networks to save elephants and rhinos from the edge of extinction.
Length: 91 minutes
Director: Kate Brooks
Producer: Kate Brooks, Stephanie Soechtig
Writer: Kate Brooks, Mark Monroe
Kate Brooks, Writer, Producer, Director
Kate Brooks is an American photojournalist who has chronicled conflict and human rights issues for nearly two decades. She began her career in Russia at the age of 20 while documenting child abuse in state orphanages. The resulting photographs were published worldwide and used by the Human Rights Watch to campaign for orphans’ rights.
Following 9/11, Brooks moved to Pakistan to photograph the impact of U.S. foreign policy and spent the next 10 years covering conflict across the Middle East. Brooks has been the recipient of numerous international awards, and her photographs are regularly published in American and European magazines and have been exhibited in galleries and museums. Her introspective collection of essays and photographs, In the Light of Darkness: A Photographer’s Journey After 9/11, was selected as one of the best photography books of 2011.
Brooks’s passion for filmmaking was sparked from working as a contributing cinematographer in Afghanistan on the film The Boxing Girls of Kabul. The film won the Inspirit Foundation Pluralism Prize at Hot Docs and a Canadian Screen Award. In 2012-13, Brooks was awarded a Knight Wallace Fellowship at the University of Michigan.
There she researched the pan African poaching epidemic before embarking on directing The Last Animals. Her drive and passion for this issue come from the fundamental belief that time is running out and that we are at a critical moment in natural history.
Mark Monroe, Writer
Mark Monroe is a journalism graduate from the University of Oklahoma. Monroe began his television career in Atlanta as a CNN news writer for Headline News and Newsnight. Monroe has since transitioned his writing talents to documentary film. His theatrical writing credits are many and include The Tillman Story, Chasing Ice and Fed Up . Monroe was also the writer for the 2009 Academy Award winning documentary, The Cove. In The Cove, renowned dolphin trainer Ric O’Barry and a team of activists infiltrate a Japanese cove to expose the annual slaughter of innocent dolphins. Most recently, Monroe reteamed with the director of The Cove, Louie Psihoyos, for the documentary, Racing Extinction and Jeff Orlowski on Chasing Coral.
Stephanie Soechtig, Producer
Stephanie Soechtig is an award-winning writer, producer, and documentary film director. Her most recent film, Under the Gun, received a prolonged standing ovation when it premiered at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. Lionsgate and Epix acquired the award-winning film, which critics called "masterfully crafted" and "the best film on firearms since the 2002's Oscar-winning doc Bowling for Columbine."
Two years earlier, Fed Up premiered at Sundance where it was acquired by Radius/TWC and became the second highest grossing documentary of 2014. A New York Times Critic's Pick, many have likened Fed Up to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth for the way we eat; it spotlights our addiction to sugar and the ensuing obesity epidemic, and succeeds in bringing the issue into the mainstream. Stephanie's directorial debut documentary, Tapped focused on the high cost -- to both the environment and our health -- of the bottled water industry. Hailed by critics as “stunning and “whip-smart,” Tapped swept film festivals across the country while picking up six awards for Best Documentary Feature. Dubbed by Fortune Magazine as one of the “Most Innovative Women in Food and Drink," Stephanie joined forces with Michael and Michelle Walrath in 2008 to start Atlas Films.
About the writer, director and producer:
Key cast:
ZDENĚK ČERMÁK
BATIAN CRAIG
PATRICK DUBOSCQ
YUSUF GILISHO
DR. ROBERT HERMES
DR. THOMAS B. HILDEBRANDT
DR. PAULA KAHUMBU
JANE KENNEDY
SENATOR RAYMOND J. LESNIAK
COLONEL JACQUES LUSENGO
JEAN CLAUDE MAMBO MARINDO
GRETCHEN PETERS
JEN SAMUEL
TALIGO TENGU
LENKA VÁGNEROVÁ
DR. SAMUEL K. WASSER
HRH, DUKE OF CAMBRIDGE, PRINCE WILLIAM
JAN ŽĎÁREK
Social media handles:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheLastAnimals/
Twitter: @thelastanimals @katebrooksphoto
Instagram: @thelastanimals