Stroop: Journey into the Rhino Horn War is a powerful documentary that will make you rage, weep and want to start a war of your own against the horror that is decimating Africa’s endangered white and black rhino.
It was screened in Makhanda this week.
In the documentary, filmmakers Bonné De Bod and Susan Scott feature the heroes on the ground who are trying to keep at bay a horrific tide of increasingly powerful and sophisticated poaching rings.
They move from the wildest parts of the African savannah where they follow anti-poaching units doing their grim jobs, to court rooms where trials drag on and poaching-accused disappear while out on bail.
They take us into the heart of darkness in seedy backrooms of slick wildlife traffickers and dealers in China and Vietnam.
There, with cameras hidden in keyrings and strapped with duct tape to their bodies, they film the mundane and absurd uses these highly prized horns are put to by humans.
Rhino horn is believed to have powerful detoxifying and anti-inflammatory qualities in places like China and Vietnam, where it is even billed as a cure for cancer by those who flog it at extraordinary prices to the desperate and gullible.
Gouged and stripped from the faces of once magnificent animals, it is carved into bangles and libation cups or cut into flakes to be chewed or ground up in grinding plates for ingestion.
Those who believe these ancient myths choose to ignore the science that shows the horn has no medicinal value whatsoever.
De Bod and Scott said at a screening of the documentary in Makhanda this week that the film was just one small step in the battle to keep the rhino alive and urged the audience to do their bit on social media and to attend and express outrage against poachers at the ongoing poaching court cases in the city.
The documentary, which took De Bod and Scott four years to film and produce, depicts evil in all rawest rhino-hacking, corpse-rotting, money-hungry forms and is not for the faint-hearted.
Perhaps one of the most powerful metaphors of evil and its devastation of innocence is the Fundimvelo Thula Thula rhino orphanage and sanctuary in Empangeni.
When the pair began filming the documentary, the sanctuary was still doing extraordinary work raising traumatised baby rhino whose mothers had been viciously killed by poachers. Some had taken refuge inside the rotting corpses of their moms for weeks before being rescued.
But, heartwarming scenes of endearing baby rhinos being coached through their trauma and fed giant bottles of milk by volunteer staff in ideal surroundings give way to blood, gore and devastation when the film crew return after the vicious February 2017 attack on the sanctuary by poachers.
The large bomas are scarred by deep muddy wheel tracks in which water and blood pool.
Devastated staff describe small rhino corpses hacked to death and tiny horns ripped from little faces. The volunteers are brutalised and one of them raped.
A space for healing and joy has become a void where horror lingers like a bad smell. The defeated sanctuary closed its doors soon afterwards.
The hard-hitting doccie has received international acclaim. It has been screened at 15 film festivals across the world and scooped multiple international awards, including Best Documentary award at the prestigious San Diego International Film Festival and the San Pedro International Film Festival.
It has also scooped the Los-Angeles-based Glendale International Film Festival’s Best Female Filmmakers award and LA Femme’s Special Documentary of Focus Award and the 2018 Green Tenacity Award by the judges of the San Francisco Green Film Festival...