29th December 2014 The Last Days of Ivory Released this month, The Last Days of Ivory is a short but powerful documentary by the Oscar-winning director, Kathryn Bigelow. It graphically illustrates the ivory trade and its connections to funding terrorism. Faced with soaring demand and industrial-scale killing methods, African elephants are in crisis and will go extinct in the wild in the next decade without urgent action. Bigelow says: “Last year I was made aware of the very real connection between elephant poaching and terrorism. For me it represented the diabolical intersection of two problems that are of great concern – species extinction and global terrorism. Both involve the loss of innocent life, and both require urgent action. To make a feature film about such a topic would likely take years during which more elephants would die, so instead I approached a team of fellow filmmakers and we made LAST DAYS as an animated piece, which we thought would give it a broader audience (besides, the internet is filled with graphic images of slaughtered elephants and yet the killing continues). There are real things we can all do to stop wild elephants from disappearing from our world while cutting off funding for some of the world’s most notorious terrorist networks.” For more information, visit the official website at lastdaysofivory.com. Comments »
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