Endangered Siamese crocodile in rare sighting at Thai national park
The critically endangered Siamese crocodile has been spotted for only the second time in a decade at Thailand’s largest national park, according to photos released yesterday. The freshwater reptile - snapped by camera traps sunning itself at Kaeng Krachan National Park near the Thai border with Myanmar - was once ubiquitous across Southeast Asia, but its numbers have plummeted in the region. It is currently listed as critically endangered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s red list.
National park officials estimate only about 20 remain in the wild because of hunting and habitat loss, but yesterday the nature reserve shared a rare spot of good news. The crocodile - never seen before by officials - was captured by cameras slithering out of the water, before it parked itself on the river bank open-jawed under the sun. The footage was captured in December and is “proof that Kaeng Krachan National Park is an important area for wildlife conservation,” said Manoon Prewsoongnern, a park manager who works with the NGO World Conservation Society. The crocodile is estimated to be about 3m long, he said, adding that this is only the second sighting of the species in the past decade.
“The Siamese crocodile is a predator, but it is one of the first victims of environmental corrosion, so the sighting... is also evidence that the national park’s environment is still pristine,” Manoon said. The endangered crocodile is highly sought after by poachers, who supply eggs and adult reptiles to farms around the region, where their skins are turned into luxury belts, shoes and handbags.
Sudanese filmmakers who celebrated the end of stifling restrictions following the ouster of autocrat Omar AlBashir have won multiple international awards but are yet to enjoy the same recognition at home. Cinema languished in the North African country through three decades of authoritarian rule by Bashir. But Sudanese took to the streets to demand freedom, peace and social justice, and Bashir’s ironfisted rule came to an end in a palace coup by the army in April 2019.
“We started realizing how much our society needs our dreams,” said director Amjad Abou Alala. His 2019 film “You Will Die at Twenty” was both Sudan’s first Oscar entry and the first Sudanese film broadcast on Netflix, winning prizes at international film festivals including Italy’s Venice and Egypt’s El Gouna. The film tells the story of a young man a mystic predicts will die at age 20.
As Sudan undergoes a precarious political transition, the country’s filmmakers have found more space to operate, Alala said. Young filmmakers act “without the complexes, the lack of self-confidence or the frustration that we suffered in previous generations”, he added.
Art ‘aborted’ under Bashir
Talal Afifi, director of the Khartoumbased Sudan Film Factory program, has trained hundreds of young people in filmmaking. Bashir’s government “aborted all cultural and artistic initiatives and fought... diversity and freedom of opinion, through policies of alleged Islamization and Arabization”, he said.
Afifi began work long before the 2019 revolution, with advances in digital camera technology making filmmaking far more accessible. The filmmaker attended a 2008 short film festival in Munich, where the winning film - an Iraqi documentary shot on a handy-cam - inspired him to return home and set up a training center and production house.
In the past decades, the Film Factory has organized some 30 screenwriting, directing and editing workshops - and produced more than 60 short films, honored in international festivals from Brazil to Japan. Afifi says the roots of Sudan’s innovative cinema was born from the “hard work dating from before” Bashir’s overthrow, when many cinemas were closed.
Today, cinemas are allowed - big budget Hollywood films, as well as Indian and Egyptian movies are popular - but moves to reopen them have been frustrated by restrictions to stem the spread of the novel coronavirus. The Sudanese National Museum organized screenings of films, including “You Will Die at Twenty”, but they were not screened in large theatres.
Filmmakers still face challenges. Hajooj Kuka, director of the acclaimed 2014 “Beats of the Antonov” was jailed for two months last year for causing a “public nuisance” - for what he said was an acting workshop. Other Sudanese films have also garnered international attention, including the 2019 documentary “Talking About Trees” by Suhaib Gasmelbari, which tells the story of four elderly Sudanese filmmakers with a passion for movies.
The quartet and their “Sudanese Film Club” work to reopen an open-air cinema in Omdurman, the city across the Nile from the capital Khartoum. It won prizes ranging from the Berlin International Film Festival to awards from Istanbul, Athens and Mumbai.
‘Leap into the void’
Another film, director Marwa Zein’s award-winning 2019 documentary “Khartoum Offside”, tackles sexism in the conservative country through the story of young female footballers determined to play professionally. Sudan films from 2020 include “The Art of Sin”, a documentary about openly gay Sudanese artist Ahmed Umar.
A refugee in Norway, he returns to Sudan to see his mother again despite the risks that remain even after Bashir’s ouster. Many leading Sudanese directors have lived abroad for years, some shuttling between the Egyptian capital Cairo and Khartoum, like Zein and Gasmelbari. “We are children of the diaspora, which is why our analysis of the affairs of the Sudanese is critical,” said Dubai-based Alala.
But if international recognition is seen as a sign of success, Alala fears the new boom in Sudanese cinema will amount to a “leap into the void” because it has not benefited from “any official support or suitable infrastructure”. He understands that this is in part due to the many challenges facing Sudan, as it struggles with a dire economic crisis and seeks to implement a recent peace deal with rebels to end decades of civil war. While Alala says government support is necessary for the film industry to flourish, he admits that it “would be unfair to ask the new government to shoulder this burden when the economy is devastated”.