Gorillas in the Mist

This is a movie I saw recently from Netflix starring Sigorney Weaver (of Alien fame) and it is based on the life of Diane Fossey, the primatologist who devoted her life to studying and preserving the endangered mountain gorillas in Rwanda and the Congo. I think there is a book with the same title.

The photography was dramatic, especially the many shots of wild gorillas up close and cuddly with Weaver. I'm sure some were staged shots with mock animals but surely not all. And the scenery and support actors were most realistic and believable.

The film also brought some key moral and political issues to the fore, one example was when an African official admitted selling a baby gorilla to a zoo. An enraged Fossey confronting him demands to know why and his compelling reply is to raise cash to feed his starving people. Although it didn't calm her in the film it sure stopped me in my tracks. Who comes first here? Is it okay to preserve an endangered species at the expense of human suffering? Who has the moral high ground here?

Weaver portrayed Fossey as an increasingly neurotic, obsessive, and ultimately self-destructive woman who, as in a Greek tragedy, insured her own death in the end. Railing against poaching for example she stages a mock hanging and alientates not only the natives she is trying to frighten but her own followers as well.

The poachers who by the way had been hunting gorillas and other creatures inside the park for generation after generation for food, are being denied that same food by Fossey. She springs their traps, burns their village, and hires scouts to arrest them. Yet it is revealed time and again that poverty and hunger are rampant, that native people die of malnutrition everywhere in the region.

So here we are again; don't we have a right to feed ourselves? Once more, who comes first? For eons humankind has driven species to extinction by over-hunting. It's not that we are not "educated", it's expediency.....you take the nearest and easiest food. "Teaching" native peoples is not going to make it,we need to feed them first.

And here ends my review. You might try the book too, I think I will.