Kathryn Bigelow - who won an Academy Award for directing the Iraq War drama The Hurt Locker – turns her attention to the plight of elephant poaching in the new short film Last Days.
Beyond the animal rights angle, Bigelow explains that she discovered the distinct link between poaching operations and terrorism.
“Last year I was made aware of the very real connection between elephant poaching and terrorism,” the director said. “For me, it represented the diabolical intersection of two problems that are of great concern - species extinction and global terrorism.”
She added that both activities “involve the loss of innocent life, and both require urgent action.” It was the urgent nature of the problem that Bigelow said prompted her to create a short film highlighting the issue, as opposed to making a full-length documentary.
It is estimated that an elephant is killed every 15 minutes in connection with the illegal trade in ivory – with about 30,000 killed by poaching every year. If those statistics continue, elephants in the wild could be extinct in just 11 years.
Bigelow offers her personal plea in the short, emphasizing that terror organizations - including the Somalia-based al-Shabaab, Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army, Nigerian Islamic group Boko Haram and Drfur-based Janjaweed - are all using the sale of illegal ivory to carry out terror attacks.
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