In Development
Forest Spirit Media and its partners have a growing slate of feature documentaries and series in development — purpose-led stories about the people, wildlife and wild places fighting for a better future. If one of these projects speaks to you as a funder, broadcaster or collaborator, we would love to hear from you. Get in touch.
FOREST SPIRIT MEDIA · IN PRE-PRODUCTION
What does it take to reunite a smuggled baby gorilla with their own species again?
It’s been three years since Bili was seized from traffickers in Lagos, Nigeria, and she still carries a shotgun pellet in her arm from the day her mother was almost certainly killed. Most orphaned gorillas don’t make it this far; the shock of capture alone kills them within weeks. Bili did make it, and now, finally, there’s a plan to get her home. This film follows that journey: from the wild, to captivity, and to her being reunited with her own species again for the first time since her capture.
We follow Bili’s departure from a rescue centre in Calabar, Nigeria, where caretaker Imelda has raised her for three years, through a hard journey by road and air to the Jane Goodall Institute’s Tchimpounga sanctuary in Congo. Intercut with this journey, we hear the story of how she was seized from an international wildlife smuggling ring. Lead investigator from Nigeria’s Special Wildlife Office, Mani Anuhu, describes the operation to rescue Bili from traffickers, and primatologist Peter Jenkins recalls how he drove 800km with her in his arms to begin her rehabilitation in Calabar. All of this leads to the moment of her meeting another trafficked gorilla, ‘ZZ’ in Congo – the first time either ape has met their own species since they were taken from the wild. And the beginning of the last chapter for both gorillas before they are finally released back into the wild in Congo.
This film highlights the incredible work being done fighting the illegal trade in wild apes in Nigeria, at a time when international demand is rising. It shows the difficulty of rehabilitating those lucky ones who escape the trade, and the scale of the operation required to return them to the wild. But it also asks the question: how do we win the fight against the illegal wildlife trade, when it takes so much to get a gorilla back to the wild?
We are currently looking for the next stage of production financing for this project – if you are a funder looking to collaborate please get in touch.
A BARKING GECKO PRODUCTION · IN DEVELOPMENT
Welcome to Victoria Falls. A young, fast-growing African city at the centre of one of the worlds greatest wilderness areas. It’s a city where 40,000 humans live side by side with iconic wildlife like nowhere else on the planet. Five-tonne bull elephants stand in traffic alongside the cars, warthogs play with dogs in people’s gardens. And the human citizens shrug it off as another day in the urban savannah.
This city shouldn’t really work, but somehow it does. Not perfectly, and certainly not without really close calls. Not everyone’s happy when they have to face off against a gang of baboons over who owns the mangoes, or a leopard interrupts their early morning dog walk… But every day, the people of Victoria Falls fine-tune this fragile coexistence through ingenuity, adaptation, compromise and courage. VFAPU, the world’s only urban anti‑poaching unit defuse conflict 24/7. Keeping residents, tourists and wildlife alive. Following two serious elephant incidents, outcome, death for the elephants and a local resident, post‑mortems revealed plastic‑filled twisted elephant bowels. Ele Collection was founded as a result, turning city plastic into building aggregate, cleaner corridors, safer elephants, steadier streets.
This isn’t just another story of wild animals adapting to the human world. It’s not a story of human-wildlife conflict either. It’s a story of (tentative) human-wildlife HARMONY.
The Wildest City is produced by The Barking Gecko — the conservation production company Tom co-runs, turning wild stories into wilder impact through a pioneering regenerative filmmaking model.