New movie explores three unique landscapes
Just before the world became engulfed in a pandemic that would forever change the nature of human interactions, filmmakers Bonné de Bod and Susan Scott, of Stroop fame, completed filming their new independent documentary, Kingdoms of Fire, Ice and Fairy Tales.
The film was launched on Showmax last week and premiered at the Silwerskerm Fees on Friday. It was originally meant to be a series, but was adapted after Covid-19 and subsequent restrictions.
The timing could not have been better, with it serving to satisfy a host of bucket lists from wanderlusters locked down due to Covid-19.
Viewers can immerse themselves and live vicariously through De Bod and Scott’s breathtaking footage of three unique landscapes – Yellowstone National Park in the US, Black Forest National Park in Germany, and the Arctic Circle’s Swedish Lapland.
The Citizen caught up with de Bod and Scott, to find out about the challenges of filming in treacherous terrain, being away from the Kruger Park, which is like their second home, and how we foster the love they have for the environment in South Africa.
The Kruger is De Bod’s happy place. But she and Scott were taken with Yellowstone.
“It’s like being in Kruger watching big, iconic apex predators, and then you round the corner and a volcano is spewing lava and you sit and watch that. It’s really like a world I’ve never experienced,” De Bod said.
South Africa’s intricately balanced and diverse ecosystems are under constant threat, thanks to poaching and international wildlife crime syndicates.
De Bod said poaching of animals did not seem to be a problem in any parks they visited, a sad fact when one thinks of visits to the Kruger, where there is always a chance of coming across a dead rhino, a snared wild dog or an elephant missing half its trunk.
For Scott, this is a travesty of justice. She postulated a world where bison were poached like rhinos, and came to the conclusion that the US government would not stand for it. “It’s been a decade of this war with our rhinos and the slaughter is endless.
“When you’re in the Kruger and you hear that helicopter going, you know it involves poaching… There’s not a whiff of it in Yellowstone or the Black Forest or in the Arctic.”