National geographic The chain has acquired Elisabeth UngerThe feature-length wildlife crime documentary from “Tigre Gente” in Latin America, where the film will premiere on April 22 as part of the channel’s Earth Day lineup. Limonero Films acquired the film for distribution outside of Latin America. “Tigre Gente,” which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2021, is produced by Unger alongside Joanna Natasegarawho won an Oscar for ‘The White Helmets’ and was nominated for Oscars for ‘The Edge of Democracy’ and ‘Virunga’.

When Unger set out to make a feature-length documentary about the battle to protect the jaguar in Bolivia, his mission was to break new ground in the wildlife crime genre “by exploring the root cause of the mindset that fuels demand.” , she says.

She hopes the film will “help combat misconceptions and give Western audiences a better understanding of Chinese culture and tradition as it relates to wildlife consumerism.”

She adds: “We can do better, and we should do better, to understand the other side. Only then can we have a real impact and stop the illegal wildlife trade industry together.

Unger first became interested in wildlife protection in Bolivia when she was a biology student at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. She was just 19 when she first visited the country in 2009 as a volunteer working to rehabilitate animal victims of the illegal wildlife trade.

“[The experience] just stuck with me. It stuck with me for a few years. And back then, when I was more focused on photojournalism and writing, I had never really done a documentary. I thought the story would be fascinating, you know, a story about wildlife trafficking in Latin America, just because nobody was talking about it in the press. I mean, everyone was focusing on elephants and rhinos in Africa. I just wasn’t sure what exactly the story would be.

“Tigre Gente” (Courtesy of Wanderlust Productions/Violet Films)

Years later, in 2015, while in graduate school at NYU, the way forward came to her after a daytime nap. “I wasn’t going to do graduate school in conservation. I was going there for food studies, actually. I was really interested in the burning issues of food sustainability. But I found myself missing my roots in wildlife conservation and biology. So, I woke up from this nap, and I thought: I should make a documentary about wildlife trafficking in Bolivia. I have already been there. I have contacts. I just need to figure out what the story is. And I thought the film was going to take me six months, because I had never done a film before. And it ended up taking six years, now seven. That’s kind of how I got into it.

At the heart of the documentary are two major protagonists. The first is Marcos Uzquiano, ranger and director of Madidi National Park in Bolivia. A Bolivian government staff member had recommended that Unger contact Uzquiano while she was doing research and development in Bolivia in 2015. She then arranged a Zoom interview with him when she was back in the United States. “We had a great meeting together, and Marcos said, ‘As long as your film highlights Madidi National Park and inspires people to protect this place, I would love to be a part of it.’

She adds: “We couldn’t believe how lucky we were. He was so emotional, and just a great protagonist, a great human.

The second major protagonist is Laurel Chor, an investigative journalist from Hong Kong.

Laurel Chor in “Tigre Gente” (Courtesy of Wanderlust Productions/Violet Films)

“I knew Laurel from the National Geographic community. We were both scholarship holders. National Geographic Explorers is the title, but essentially we are just beneficiaries. The National Geographic Society gives us money for projects,” says Unger.

“I had seen her speak at an event in Washington DC at NatGeo headquarters, and I was blown away. I was so impressed with Laurel, and I finally approached her and said, ‘I working on this wildlife trafficking story – on this new trade in jaguar body parts for the Chinese black market. But in all the wildlife crime movies I’ve ever watched, I haven’t I’ve never seen a Chinese protagonist that actually examines or investigates why the demand exists in the Chinese community in the first place. I’ve never seen a movie like that. Would you be interested in exploring that with me? And she said, “Yeah, absolutely. And eventually, she wasn’t just a protagonist, she became an executive producer, because she developed her story with our team.”

Unger considered adding a third protagonist: American zoologist Alan Rabinowitz. “He was an eminent jaguar specialist. He was called ‘the Indiana Jones of wildlife’ and was on, you know, the Stephen Colbert show. He was this fascinating character. He was into traffic of jaguars in Suriname and was interested in another country. And we were thinking of bringing him in as the third protagonist to complement Marcos and Laurel, but he actually died of cancer, so we dedicated the film to him at the end of the generic.

In addition to including the Chinese perspective in the story, the film also pays attention to the culture of Bolivians and why some of them facilitate the illegal trade in jaguar body parts, primarily teeth, and animals. others are fighting to save cats from extinction.

Unger explains the reason for his particular approach.

“Tigre Gente” (Courtesy of Wanderlust Productions/Violet Films)

“I love gender work, and I felt like wildlife crime films are traditionally made in a very masculine way. It is: ‘Catch the bad guy’; ‘Who’s the bad guy?’; ‘Who is responsible for this?’ And you see the heroes go out and do their thing. And that’s great. But I wanted to throw my hat in the ring as a director, with a mostly female crew, to make a film that was in a more poetic, raw, visceral way.

“And you can’t do that by just focusing on commerce, you have to dig deeper into communities. And luckily, you know, we have a truly global team that made this movie. And so we felt that with our team strength, we could continue to dig into the community aspects in Bolivia, Hong Kong, and China, to better understand our characters, what drives them, and that would make an audience pay attention . on the matter more also.

“We can no longer just focus on trade and animals, the storytelling needs to be more nuanced, more sophisticated, more complete. And so by digging into that Bolivian lowland mysticism, you get that kind of genre-bending element in the wildlife crime thriller, and I think that makes it more interesting. I think it throws a curveball. I think it makes him more human. And the film is really a mixture of humans and animals. It’s not just focused on the jaguar. To be honest, a jaguar could be any commodity, any animal. We hope our storytelling will be seen as something other filmmakers can use to inspire others.

The intention was for the Chinese not to be portrayed as the archetypal villains, but in an empathetic way.

Elizabeth Unger (Courtesy of Wanderlust Productions/Violet Films)

“Oh yeah. It was long discussions I had with Laurel, who got it, you know. She didn’t think the Chinese community was well represented in this genre. So we worked together to develop a story which asked deeper questions.

“While Marcos was researching who and how in Bolivia with the local Bolivians supplying these coins, for some reason you can tell it’s a cycle of poverty and he just needs the money to feed his children. It was her world. But with Laurel, we really wanted to look at why, which I think hasn’t been done. At least not on a large scale.

“So for us, it was a very nice way – through the world of Laurel with her family, with experts and friends – to walk through and understand that this is a gray issue. This is not “is not black and white. And that’s why it’s so difficult to solve. At least with this film, we can go further and add to this conversation an important element of humanism and empathy in order to move the solutions.

Next up for Unger is another project with Natasegara, but she’s not ready to reveal details. “It’s a really special project. So please stay tuned,” she said.