Photo: 
Richard Ladkani
Sound the trumpet: elephants

“The Ivory Game”, a new Netflix film about poaching in Africa, is executive-produced by Leonardo DiCaprio and backed by Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft. The plight of the world’s largest land mammal is desperate: 150,000 have been killed in the past five years. In June, Sergey Yastrzhembsky, a former Russian politician, released “Ivory. A Crime Story”, slamming China (the biggest market for ivory). Other campaigning films include 2014’s Kathryn Bigelow’s “Last Days”, a short animation exploring the link between the ivory trade and terrorism, and “The End of the Wild”, which followed Yao Ming, a Chinese basketball star, to Kenya and South Africa, and which was screened in Beijing. The new film shows another side of Chinese involvement—investigators and whistleblowers on the frontline. But Netflix is not available in China, so it will only reach few ears and eyes there. Meanwhile, Africa’s elephants keep dying.

Nov 5th 2016
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