CONSERVation

DOCUMENTARIES

Pathfinder Films Ltd was incorporated in 1982, and since then Philip Cayford has produced and directed a number of wildlife conservation documentaries, winning more than 20 major awards including two Emmy nominations. Best known of these include African Hunters, The Rhino War, Ivory Wars, The Last Show on Earth and Vicuna, the Golden Fleece. He has advised and consulted on several other films including the BBC series Okavango - the Jewel of the Kalahari. Two of the films are included below.

THE LAST SHOW ON EARTH


The Last Show on Earth, commissioned by Central TV and produced and directed by Philip Cayford, was premiered in May 1992 to coincide with the Rio Earth summit, the first international conference addressing global sustainability and biodiversity. The film was broadcast in 128 countries and won several awards including a British Environment and Media Award, the Okomedia 1992 award and many other USA festival awards. The commission was to create an accessible look at global conservation across the planet; such a vast canvas created its own challenges, positive and negative. Making the film, the team travelled to several countries in Africa, the USA, St Lucia and St Vincent, India (including a stay with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala), France and the UK, and sourced further stunning material from the Anglia TV archives. Interviews were included with the Dali Lama, Chief Red Cloud of the Oglala Sioux tribe in South Dakota, author/conservationist Dayton Hyde, Bob Ballard, Professor Bob Watson, Ben Kingsley and many activists across the world. The musical score was written by Michael Kamen and included work from Elton John, David Gilmour, Julian Lennon, Kate Bush, Ladysmith Black Mombaza, Seal, Eric Clapton and others.

Many of the themes tackled in the film have become ever more urgent since the making of the Last Show on Earth. Climate change, air pollution, the loss of natural habitat and bio-diversity, over-exploitation of the oceans, waste disposal and human over population were all centre-stage for the 26th, 27th and 28th COP meetings. Whether the honeyed words and earnest entreaties of the delegates, often repeated, will bring about real change is another matter.


THE RHINO WAR


For 50 million years the rhino and his forbears have wandered across the planet relatively unmolested. The cave paintings of Indonesia and France in particular bear testimony to the animal’s place in human history - iconic and totemic. Early European travellers were captivated by the creature’s size and prehistoric appearance; Durer’s famous one-horned Indian rhino is believed to have the first of its kind brought across to Europe in about 1550. With the coming of rifles and white hunters into Africa during the 19th century, the beast suffered its first real assault; at the time both main species of African rhino were abundant and made an easy target for the Victorian adventure seekers. By 1920 the white rhino in South Africa was facing extinction; it took a concerted conservation effort at the 11th hour to bring it back from the brink. But it is the modern poacher, from the 1970’s onwards, who has inflicted irreparable damage on the species. From estimated numbers in the hundreds of thousands as recently as 1970, the African rhino has come under siege as never before. Fuelled by demand from the Middle East (mainly Yemen) for rhino horn dagger handles and more so from China and the Far East for use in ‘traditional medicine’, armed poachers have swept through the continent scything populations to no more than 5% of their pre-existing numbers. It has been a bitter war at the very front of conservation’s thin green line - and one which we have been losing spectacularly. There are probably no more than 18,000 white rhinos across the whole of Africa now, and less than 6000 black rhinos. Men, women and animals are dying; the anti-poaching units of Wildlife Departments across the continents are equally armed and equally prepared to kill. The morality of taking a human life for an animal’s life has been subsumed into the desperate effort to save a species from extinction, a struggle which shows no sign of abating, and few signs of success.

In 1986 Philip Cayford was commissioned by National Geographic Explorer to make its first original production, a 50 minute documentary on the plight of the black rhino in Africa. He travelled to Kenya, Zimbabwe, Yemen and Hong Kong on the trail of the rhino horn traffickers, from the plains and forests of Africa to the end consumer in the Middle and Far East. The film eventually won more than 12 awards (and two Emmy nominations) and was screened in more than 50 countries.