Screened as part of NZIFF 2017

Trophy 2017

Directed by Shaul Schwarz

This thorny doco about commercialised wildlife conservation in Africa juxtaposes the potent emotional appeal of animal rights activism and the ‘if it pays, it stays’ rationalism of big game hunters.

UK / USA In Afrikaans and English with English subtitles
108 minutes DCP

Director

Co-director

Christina Clusiau

Producers

Lauren Haber
,
Julia Nottingham

Photography

Christina Clusiau
,
Shaul Schwarz

Editors

Halil Efrat
,
Jay Arthur Sterrenberg

Music

Jeremy Turner
,
Erick Lee

With

Philip Glass
,
John Hume
,
Michelle Otto
,
Christo Gomes
,
Joe Hosmer
,
Adam Roberts
,
Tim Fallon
,
Richard Hume
,
Gysbert Van Der Westhuyzen
,
Chris Moore
,
Li Lotriot
,
Pam Hume
,
Will Travers
,
Pieter Potgieter
,
Travis Courtney

Festivals

Sundance
,
SXSW 2017

Elsewhere

In 2015 a single image of an African lion named Cecil, killed by a Minnesota dentist, said everything that needs to be said about big-game hunting for millions of people the world over. In this intelligent, disconcerting documentary filmmakers Shaul Schwarz and Christina Clusiau invite us to take a more careful look. Challenging us-vs-the-deplorable polarities, the filmmakers steer us deep into the ethos of one inveterate American ‘hunter’ whose view of God-given ‘dominion over the animals’ is clearly ascendant in a globalised, monetised world.

That literal ownership – through corralling and breeding – might in fact be the surest road to conservation is championed memorably, and movingly, by a white South African rhino farmer. His campaign to legalise the remunerative export of the allegedly aphrodisiac rhinoceros horn is opposed by animal rights activists. “How much do they know of African realities?” he replies.

Confronting those realities, not least the ravages of game poachers and the lives of dirt-poor African villagers, Trophy provides a singularly provocative picture of the Great White Hunter as Africa’s destroyer tasking itself to be saviour too.