By: Michael Beas – Atlas Elite Publishers
Filmmaker Tom Opre spent three years chronicling a remote Zambian community led by a visionary woman chief. This chief challenged poverty by taking on wildlife poaching. In 2015, Lower Luano Valley’s children faced starvation due to generations of subsistence living, supplemented by limited game consumption. Their collaboration with the safari hunting industry once supported wildlife protection and community finances. However, a government ban on hunting in 2001-2002 left a void filled by organized bushmeat poaching.
Over fifteen years, the wildlife suffered extensive losses, including the iconic African Big Five: elephants, lions, leopards, cape buffalos, and rhinos. Once abundant, these animals dwindled alongside other plains game. With hunting funds reduced, the community lost hope as safari operators shied away from “game-depleted” areas without hunting quotas.
The Shikabeta community, guided by a wise chief, sought a solution. They connected with Roland Norton, an import/export customs dealer aspiring to run a safari concession. Filmmaker Tom Opre documented their unique business agreement from 2017 to 2020. The process unfolded with intricacies, challenges, and victories that yielded remarkable outcomes for both wildlife and the community.
“Killing the Shepherd: Beyond the Film” goes beyond the cutting room floor to delve deeper than any film. Raw and gritty, this book takes readers through a transformative journey, instilling hope for Africa’s wildlife future. Moreover, it serves as a blueprint, empowering rural communities across the continent to assert their fundamental human rights.
How do you balance your passion for hunting with the responsibilities of being a filmmaker and photographer?
We all have experiences in life that make us who we are. My father, a newspaper journalist, didn’t make much money. He had a serious interest in nature, like Aldo Leupold (author of the Sand County Almanac). He found that if you took care of nature, it would take care of you. With two young growing boys to feed, he kept the freezer filled with wild game and fish. He taught me to hold nature sacred. He wanted to protect it from destruction. He always said the first environmentalist was the hunter.
Yet, as a documentary filmmaker, I help people tell their stories. Since I look to connect wildlife and habitat conservation and human rights, the guiding principles of my youth help me better understand the issues. I liken it to part-filmmaker and part-investigative journalist. You’re always looking for the money shot – a subject or landscape filled with backlit beauty – yet you let the issue take you down a path with many twists and turns. It’s an unscripted production. You never know where you’ll end up.
How do you approach storytelling through your visual content to engage and inspire your audience?
There’s always conflict. Emotion. People with strong personalities and opinions are key. You marry their story with the spectacular grandeur of nature. Nature provides the most beautiful canvas of all. When you put the human element on that canvas, the magic occurs. My target audience is people who live in urban settings. These people don’t watch pale orange sunrises over a brown, gurgling river in remote Africa. They don’t hear the drum-like call of the three-foot-tall ground hornbills (birds) calling out into the cool morning air. They can’t see the sunset across a rugged, snow-capped mountain range while a herd of tawny-colored elk feeds slowly across a grassy plain as a far-off bull elk pushes out his high-pitched bugle.
When you bring in the human element, you see the big picture. As the dominant species on our planet, urban populations worldwide must understand that those beautiful moments they see in nature documentaries will only continue to exist as long as they support modern conservation, providing for the fundamental human rights of rural indigenous communities. We have thousands of years of human history where we have mucked up nature. With eight billion humans on the planet, we must see good stewards or shepherds manage the land. Otherwise, it all goes the way of the Dodo Bird.
Talk to us about working with your team and how you coordinate with them to capture them when filming?
Our film crew is a basic affair. Typically, I travel with a still photographer, one of our fellows from the Shepherds of Wildlife Society, and, sometimes, one camera assistant. There are shoots where I’m the only crew member. Why? People are uncomfortable with a big Hollywood camera crew and equipment pointing in their faces. I’ve found that keeping things small, including using the smallest professional camera packages like the RED Komodo, allows me to be less intrusive in my subjects’ eyes. I want people to be comfortable.
Carrying a camera since I was nineteen and working on film shoots with 200 crew members down to two-man affairs has taught me how to be efficient and, yet, work to get the best possible image in the camera. While filming Killing the Shepherd (2021) in remote Zambia, I taught a game scout named Bright to be a grip and hold a reflector. He and photographer Tony Bynum (www.tonybynum.com) were my whole crew. The film went on to win a handful of Best Cinematography Awards at film festivals against narrative features and their extensive lighting and grip crews.
How did the stunning landscapes of Scotland contribute to the visual storytelling in the new film ‘The Last Keeper?’
Nature is filled with stunning landscapes. Scotland has been a location for many mainstream film and television productions. If you’ve watched Outlander or even some Harry Potter films, you’ve seen the Scottish Highlands. The rugged Highlands are Scottish tourism’s calling card. Add the long ancestral history; many Americans (US and Canada) strongly connect through their ancestry to Scotland. I have plenty of relatives buried on the island. But the key is marrying together the epic locations with the people. That is what creates a compelling story.
What advice would you give to someone who is considering turning their passion for the outdoors into a full-time career?
Passion is the keyword. Often, I’m asked to speak to university students about a career in filmmaking. Once the professor leaves the lecture hall, I ask the students for a show of hands of who is getting a degree in some facet of film production. Since these classes often are entry-level courses like film theory, usually about half the class raises their hands. My following statement to them is for everyone who raised their hand, after the lecture, to find their academic advisor and change their degree emphasis to some liberal arts or business track. Why? Maybe three percent of those who raised their hand will ever work in the film production industry. And those who do will only do so after a long and difficult slug into and up the film production ranks.
Unless you’re attending one of a handful of prestigious film schools in southern California or in NYC connected to major Hollywood talent, the chances of getting a job that covers your cost of living are incredibly remote. It’s not a big industry. My first freelance job in the film business paid $50 a day. I didn’t work every day of the week or every week of the year, and sometimes, not every month.
You have to have passion for the work. I suggest those with interest in any filmmaking be young, don’t get married or have children, and make sure their financial overhead is next to zero; then, go out and find someone in the film industry whose work inspires you and figure out how to get them to hire you – even if it’s for $50 a day. That’s how you learn how to be a good filmmaker.
What is one of the most memorable experiences that you have personally had when filming?
In remote Africa, most folks are subsistence farmers. They are trying to live on substandard soils and, due to climate change, find rainfall for crops limiting. Add various animals like baboons and insects fighting for their crops; their efforts at farming often fail. Most of these families have five, six, or even ten children. Like the American pioneer days, families must be large as many children don’t survive due to malnutrition, disease, and animal attacks, including crocodiles. The resulting poverty leads to parents selling off their daughters after puberty. Often, they are only twelve or thirteen years old. Men with means purchase them as second or third wives.
In my film Killing the Shepherd, I featured a young child bride, a thirteen-year-old with an infant son. While she was the only wife, her husband was thirty-one. I have three daughters. Two of them are teenagers. The situation hit me hard emotionally. During her interview, she flatly stated she had no food, had never gone to school, and had no hope for the future.
Before wrapping the film, I had started an effort at the Zambia location with the safari operator to repurpose wire snares used by animal poachers and removed from the bush by game scouts into bracelets. This required the Shepherds of Wildlife Society to provide the salaries of eight local community women. Each bracelet represents one animal saved in the wild. They are marketed and sold through the organization’s website (www.shepherdsofwildlife.org). On the last film shoot, I asked the safari operator to provide a job to the child bride, making bracelets with the other community women. Knowing she had a job in an area with no job opportunities outside the safari company efforts allowed me to help in my own way.
For more information visit www.shepherdsofwildlife.org
Download Tom Opre’s new book in the following link
Published by: Martin De Juan
