Here’s a movie worth looking up to
The Woman Who Loves Giraffes
K (out of 4) Written and directed by Alison Reid. Opens Friday at Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema. 82 minutes. G Four years before Jane Goodall so famously came to Africa to study chimpanzees, a freshfaced 23-year-old Toronto woman came to South Africa in 1956 to study giraffes.
The concept of studying an animal intensely in its natural habitat was new and Anne Innis Dagg was a pioneer, only the second person in the world to do so.
But while Goodall has earned her well-deserved place in science and popular culture, Innis Dagg has largely been forgotten. This documentary explains why and it’s a fascinating tale, albeit with a depressing Canadian twist.
Stunt co-ordinator turned director Alison Reid deserves high praise for fine storytelling, combining ecology and socialjustice issues while focusing on a woman ahead of her times, whose ambitions were thwarted by institutional sexism.
Reid offers a couple of reasons why Innis Dagg (the daughter of famed Canadian economist Harold Innis) never achieved anything close to the notoriety achieved by Goodall, although the film opens amusingly with Innis Dagg’s appearance on the old game show To Tell the Truth. (Guess how many of the four panellists correctly guessed which of the three contestants was actually her.)
First, Reid posits that human beings don’t have the same connection to giraffes as they do to primates (who share of a sort of kinship) or even to elephants.
Second, Innis Dagg was held back by the miserable smallminded world of Canadian academia of the late 1960s and the 1970s. She simply couldn’t get tenure (or respect) from her male colleagues of the day, despite being the foremost giraffe expert of her time and being published in the world’s top academic scientific journals.
In the end, even the Ontario Human Rights Commission and other institutions failed to come to her aid, propelling her lifelong activism as a feminist.
Her decades-long exile from Africa — she raised a family in Canada with a supportive husband and wrote books — offers an opportunity to revisit the continent in modern times to unveil a sobering truth, that giraffe populations have been decimated even more extensively than those of primates or elephants. These majestic animals are barely hanging on and that’s the film’s urgent secondary message.
Innis Dagg is a determined woman and Reid combines the past (through archival footage) and the present to tell a compelling story.