By Hilton Mwabili
A mobile cinema; The Elephant Queen Outreach Programme, has embarked on a nationwide
campaign to inspire Kenyans to appreciate, understand and protect wildlife through the public screening of an internationally acclaimed film- ‘The Elephant Queen’.”
The Elephant Queen is a Kenyan feature documentary, filmed in the greater Tsavo-Amboseli ecosystem.
Hundreds of people gathered at Mikindani grounds in Mombasa to watch the Kiswahili version of the film. It revolves around the life of Athena, an elephant matriarch, who will do everything in her power to protect her family when they are forced to leave their waterhole.
“The film is ‘a poetic love-letter to elephants’, and carries a powerful message to the world. It urges us to understand and care about different species and to ultimately conserve the wild spaces that they need to exist,’ Etienne Oliff, the director of the film said.
He explains that the film took him and his colleagues ten years to make during which elephants descended into crises like being poaching for ivory, the increasing human wildlife conflict and the loss of elephant rangelands.
The number of elephants in Africa is approximately less than half a million today. Elephants continue to be illegally poached for their tusks. In the past, ivory was fashioned into ornaments and exported to be made into piano keys, brush handles, billiard balls, combs, name seals (hankos) and also used as inlay and for intricate carvings. Today, the legal trade in ivory has been shut down, but there is still an illegal trade run by criminals.
“This convinced us that more needed to be done and so ‘The Elephant Queen Outreach Program’ was born,” he said.
He added that the mobile cinema group will take the film to hundreds of schools and communities living along areas that are particularly vulnerable to human –elephant conflict.
The outreach also seeks to create interactive conservation education and mentorship resources to support and empower conservation education initiatives across the country.
“Across Africa, poaching is the threat to elephants that needs to be addressed immediately. In the long term, the major threats to elephants are habitat loss and human-wildlife conflict. Elephants are large free-ranging animals, surprisingly similar to us, that live in family groups led by wise and experienced matriarchs. It is up to every one of us to decide whether we want these remarkable, sentient animals to continue to share the planet with us or not.” the director said.
