 king of beasts an interview with tomer almagor king of beasts an interview with tomer almagor thu 10042018 1731 film review  photo courtesy of christian scholz filmfest oldenburg by lindsay r bellinger king of beasts may not be the easiest viewing experience but it s definitely worthwhile six years in the making this documentary follows aaron neilson a colorado hunting consultant and big game trophy hunter as he prepares for his 14th lion hunt it premiered in the majestic staatstheater state theater at the 25th edition of the oldenburg international film festival codirectors cowriters tomer almagor and nadav harel finished shooting back in 2016 but struggled to raise funding to cover postproduction costs perhaps the the worldwide uproar surrounding the death of cecil the 13 yearold lion in zimbabwe who was killed in 2015 caused some issues it was fascinating to observe the world of trophy hunting through a flyonthewall perspective even more so knowing that the filmmakers are avid animal lovers at times it almost felt more like a pure journalistic piece of filmmaking although the music was occasionally a bit too heavyhanded the filmmakers intention wasn t really clear until the end cards when they called out trophy hunting and instead shifted the focus to animal conservation for some viewers that may have been too late the nature lovers who are more familiar and comfortable with david attenborough style documentaries might find king of beasts to be an unsettling affair this film is a far cry from the average nature documentary not everyone was on board for quietly sitting back and listening to aaron and his chums discuss the conservation efforts and aid to local economies that they see as positives coming from their hunting adventures in tanzania after the premiere i definitely heard some grumbling from those who had hope for some sort of narration the power of documentary filmmaking is in full force even though the viewer is left to her or his own devices it s a mustsee film regardless of one s feelings about trophy hunting this highlyanticipated and controversial film took the unassuming quaint region in northwest germany by the guff some audience members were gasping some walked out that s the power of cinema sitting down to talk to tomer almagor was quite an experience his passion for filmmaking and for lions shined through he was excited to go into more detail about how they observed not only the wildlife in tanzania but the hunters and locals almagor much like the film is less judgmental but rather open asking the viewer to see trophy hunting for what it is what we see as we follow around aaron and his buddies the film crew initially went into this project with the intention of exposing all of the awful hidden things going on instead they came out of it realizing that trophy hunting is not the biggest problem for lions and other wild animals throughout africa that makes this documentary all the more curious it asks the viewer to take it upon her or himself to research and delve more into this topic many of us live in a world that is far too comfortable far too caught up in tweets we instantly react and call out something that pops up on social media the international debate on animal conservation is as contentious as ever and this film is a welcome addition to the discussion let s just hope that enough people are willing to give it a shot photo courtesy of barbel ullmann taken at the world premiere  attending your world premiere was quite a visceral experience sitting there in the oldenburger staatstheater with hundreds of strangers not really knowing what to expect   king of beasts   was observational less preachy than other documentaries it really brought us into the savannah with aaron neilson your protagonist last night before the premiere you said that it was a sixyear long project can you talk about the early stages of that development process   tomer almagor well as i mentioned the idea was brought to my attention by the producer i didn t know it still existed i m a bit naive sometimes and i didn t realize that hunting existed in such an industrialized way with many many hunters from all over the world except 70 of trophy hunters who go after lions are from the us they go out there and shoot their lion trophy every year so i was blown away by that as someone who cares about the environment and animals i also have to say as a cinephile and a filmmaker i grew up on tarzan movies and westerns you know tough men with guns that appealed to me and i love africa so i knew right away that there is something that is very cinematic but it s a tough subject so now the situation was like what kind of movie do we want to make we were thinking about lions becoming extinct and so forth so the first thing that came to mind was okay we re making a cause movie if we have to make similarities we could say blackfish or the cove and stuff like that so we were thinking of bringing both sides to the table you know the animal rights people and hunters and see how that goes i want to mention here that gabrielle is not here at the interview but she was an instrumental part of getting this to happen she actually brought the project to me she s carried this project through the years when it was in remission through and through financing and all the other stuff she is a major animal lover so for her it was very important that the film actually touches on the real problems and hopefully allows everyone to come to the table and create some kind of a solution we always knew that there would be a lion hunter at the center of the film  yeah you mean aaron neilson   ta yeah exactly we didn t know it was going to be him we knew it was going to be a lion hunter so we knew that would be the hardest thing to achieve because we come from politically speaking i m a liberal so we didn t know how that s going to go the first thing we had in mind was okay we re going to go to the conferences they have these huge conferences this head of the organization they have sci safari club international they hold these conferences once or twice a year in vegas and reno nevada and later i discovered there s a thing called dallas safari club dsc which is separate from the safari club international it s pretty big as well dallas can have ten thousand twenty thousand hunters or huntinglovers at one time safari club international can have forty fifty sixty thousand and they can have representation there from us fish and wildlife service and scientists come they also have auctions for hunting it s all around hunting but it s also all around hunting as conservation it s important to mention in north america in the united states we do have the north american hunting model which essentially supports all of the fishing and wildlife activities in the national parks we have amazing national parks in americathey are being supported by hunting so people pay for licenses for hunting for deer and stuff like that the money goes back and obviously this head organization comes across as the nra and they re evil but they are trying to instate the north american hunting model in africa they also have a lot of other things that i personally dislike you know like they have to hunt the biggest or they have these competitions where they compare sizes when it comes to lions which means the head when you hunt the biggest in the gene pool you are hurting the gene pool but anyway going back to the subject you know we started going to these hunting conventions first of all undercover kind of like the cove we thought yeah we re gonna catch them then we realized that they are very open to speak to you if you come in a certain way specifically for me and my codirector partner nadav harel we ve been to the israeli army and we ve both shot guns and they the hunting convention attendees all like israel very much maybe it s like an evangelical thing so it was easy for us to get close to them and we found quite a few hunters over the years and quite a few of them also backed out  what reasons did they give for backing out   ta for various reasons i mean if i have to mention one person he was really into it but it was his first lion hunt and then he was like well i want it to be very intimate i want it to be mine i don t want you guys tagging along plus hunting is complicated and when you don t feel comfortable about your hunting skills a film crew gets in the way well they always have their own film crew as you see in the movie they always have that because they wanna immortalize their achievement so finally we got to aaron and that was a fairly quick process even though to make sure he sent us to meet a scientist her name is dr paula white she is a woman that he really trusts he actually developed the code of ethics of hunting a lion which is mentioned in the movie it has to be at least six years old he developed that with her and some other scientists there were a few people on the other side of the fence who were brought into the table like dereck joubert who is a major animal rights activist so that s an interesting initiative we spoke to paula and that was a strange experience as well as a scientist she gets a lot of hate mail and threats  it s so bizarre that some of these groups fighting against harming wild animals don t see the wrong in threatening the lives of humans i really wonder how they can justify that   ta absolutely in her case we had to go to northern california she wouldn t give us the exact location we met her somewhere in secret in a national park not in her home  wow that sounds like a super top secret undercover deep throat kind of rendezvous   ta yeah we came out of our car and she came out of her car we spoke a little bit and she realized very quickly that we had done our research and we come from a scientific standpoint i guess that it s important to mention that one of the things that we started with was numbers the first thing that we heard was that less than 20000 lions are still in existence in comparison to 1970 when they had like 500000 then we started hearing especially from the hunters that it s 40000 but the discrepancy is huge almost 100 or more 40 to 20 but the bottom line is that it s very low so once we proved to her that we were prescribing to the idea that the numbers were not clear we are not necessarily bashing hunters we re trying to understand and stuff like that then she was open for an interview and we got that and once that happened aaron subscribed to making the movie and we got him still of aaron neilson from king of beasts  how long was that entire process before you got aaron fully on board   ta i think about a few months maybe almost a year because there was a moment when the movie was kind of dead we had another hunter that was in 100 and he has hunted many many lions but he backed out i m not sure why with him it probably would have been a very extreme experience of a movie because he teases the animals to charge him and then he shoots them  dangerous  ta and unethical he was actually kicked out of the organization and he was one of the founders  it makes me wonder how he morphed into that extreme of a hunter   ta i suppose that he was always like that that s his personality aaron is in your face as you can tell but he s also sort of well spoken and selfrighteous and right in some things  we are all right in some things wrong in some things nobody is 100 correct   ta exactly there is no black or white it s somewhere in between  that s why i suppose trophy hunting is very controversial many people only see black or white these people will likely go into this film or avoid this film expecting to hate it or love it it d be nice if audiences would go watch your film open to taking in all that is up on the screen judgments aside it seems a difficult request though especially after having see the worldwide outrage to cecil the lion can you talk a little more about walter palmer the dentist who hunted cecil the lion you said last night that the public s reaction to cecil and walter palmer somehow stalled or affected your production   ta well not necessarily but it was a strange moment so we went into the bush in tanzania and we were filming aaron when this was happening somewhere else in zimbabwe and when we came out we didn t have any reception to the media or anything we came out it happened we landed in the us and all of a sudden it came very quickly to us back then we were working with high profile celebrities so that s how it kind of came to us so we started getting requests from good morning america and all these crazy shows to comment but we didn t have a movie we weren t very clear what we just achieved in terms of footage and we heard so much wrong information in the news which was sensational  the media is often completely onesided on controversial topics such as this painting someone as evil just for the sake of headlines   ta yeah completely misinformed and we heard experts oh this lion expert that works at a zoo in canada he s gonna come on cnn and speak and then he talks and he has no idea what he s talking about plus talking about africa as a continent is wrong especially in terms of lions because each country is very different this film takes place in tanzania tanzania has the largest population of lions i believe it s about 18000 again the numbers there is no reason to quote them the bottom line is 18000 in comparison to say maybe 2000 or less in kenya or maybe 5000 in zimbabwe so they have their own issues on the other hand they have huge national parks like the selous and the serengeti so a huge portion of this population is protected to a degree so with cecil they can lure the lions out of the park but that s the thing when they say lure a lion i don t know exactly what happened there this happened in zimbabwe with cecil it could be that the lion was very very hungry the put bait on the trees i have to be honest based on even what you saw in the movie they do sort of lure the lion to them because lions are always hungry and when there is free meat on a tree somewhere the lion will go there and will find it as we see in the first encounter in the movie all of a sudden when they see the lion the lion was there because the lion smelled the meat and they may do a little bit of a dogandpony show for their camera and our camera but i don t think that they were surprised that the lion showed up all of a sudden  even though i m not a fan of hunting i somehow appreciated it more that aaron was using a bow and arrow for the hunt not a gun it somehow felt more fair to me going closer to the tradition of arrow and spear hunting does aaron often choose to hunt lions with bow and arrow   ta i think that was his first time with bow and arrow at that point of the film he s taken his 14th lion i believe that he has the second largest collection as a lion trophy hunter in the world there is another person named steven chancellor he sits on trump s fish and wildlife committee right now which is packed with trophy hunters which you know obviously in this case it s leaning more towards you have to create bonds it s kind of like we mentioned at the end of the movie everyone has to come to the table together there are much bigger problems than trophy hunting i don t support trophy hunting i m totally against it and i don t see the point in it but it s on a moral and ethical level as far as i see it there are huge problems such as commercial organized crime poaching human encroachment the people just come in and in and in and they take away the habitats of the lions you know lions need areas to live and even food in those areas so there is a clash the lions will go to the people s areas and eat their cows if you ever met the masai people and eat their cows they will retaliate and the way they do it they ll poison the source of water so now you don t lose one lion you lose a pride of lions and all the animals that touched these lions as well birds and every animal that drinks from that source of water so poisoning human encroachment poaching these are huge problems trophy hunting if it s done ethically under this code it works again on my end i m not sure whether it s always done ethically and i have no idea whether the lion we tracked with aaron and they killed in the movie is six years or younger i don t know they show us the teeth on purpose oh look which is supposed to tell the audience that this lion has been in the wild for seven eight years because of the bones they told us something interesting that i didn t know that lions in the wild only live on average seven to eight years so lions in captivity in the zoo can live up to twenty years old but in the wild they have so much competition hyenas alonethat s another thing we learned hyenas and lions are eternal enemies hyenas would come in packs they will take the prey and fight the lion they will chase a lion a lion will essentially instead of being the king of the jungle or king of the savannah is now fighting for his place in the food chain becoming a scavenger in a way especially a lonely lion like the one we saw in the film when it s not in a pride no lioness is helping him getting food because the males are more lazy they like to hang out for twenty hours  can you speak a little more about the lion that aaron killed in the film how did you track him   ta we were tracking three lions in three different areas and trees and this by the way i don t know if it shows in the movie but it s a huge area you would drive from one bait to another and it would take a couple of hours so you would spend 18 hours in the back of the truck aaron and the driver were the only ones comfortable in those conditions you keep going to those different trees and keep seeing the photos you see what lion is feeding there and then they choose so they made a choice and kind of let us in on that they may have looked at the photos and said this one looks younger i think that they have we haven t seen it physically until they have made a decision it did feel that this lion kind of gave up  in some ways it feels hypocritical unless all of these animal rights activists are vegetarians or vegans that they categorize animals on a certain level i mean why should one animal s life be put above another s just because it s cute and has a name it seems like some protesters really enjoy looking down at others judging them so harshly when we as a global society do consume lots of meat a lot of which is slaughtered in really unethical somewhat secret ways in our home countries   ta it s actually important to mention if you remember by the end of the film there are strings of meat hanging that s lion meat  right i assumed that s what it was  ta they say like in the beginning that they make beef jerky out of it there was lion and leopard that they shot earlier we just didn t want to put the leopard in the film because that scene was competing with the lion and too much killing is just a turnoff nobody wants to it s just more important that the film shows and takes you on it  yeah so the lion meat was actually being used as a source of food what many outsiders might not even consider   ta there s another important thing to mention people just look at it as africa and not specific countries they look at it as the killing of lions the hunting of lions the murdering of lions as an umbrella term you have camp hunting which is a very unethical sport if you can call it that which is basically when they breed lions to be shot in close quarters you know 6000 sq meters or whatever they release the lion maybe one or two days before the hunter shows up the lion is halfdrugged very easy to kill it s murder it s nothing else and i guess it s similar to the industrialization of meat in the west that should be illegal what we see in the movie is a wild animal hunt this is a wild lion who lives in the wild no one knew either us or them if there was going to be a lion in that area they knew that there are wild lions in the area but they didn t know whether they will track one again as an outsider and having spoken to some hunters that actually changed their mind we had a strong south african consultant on who we started with us he s hunted and still hunts he believes that the way to save a hunt he was talking about a leopard hunt for 34 weeks by foot the oldfashioned way kind of like seeing at the beginning of the film  yeah that old footage was a bold start to the film   ta but even then we see the white man s camera they the native hunters were still doing it for the camera although they were doing it their way which was very interesting mourning the lion they were actually respecting the beast mourning the loss of the animal unlike he the cameraman was doing so there s all these discrepancies in everyone s theories  the remorse aspect of hunting online i was watching some interviews with biggame hunters two of them mentioned the remorse saying that as a hunter if one doesn t feel any ounce of remorse for taking an animal s life then they should really reconsider hunting i felt like aaron also touched upon that in the film   ta yeah he did say that it s hard for me to always tell whether he aaron totally means things or not him specifically but he definitely had all the checks and balances on everything that many of them say and he felt very sincere sometimes for example in the gym when he has tears we didn t stage any of that we weren t expecting it we were a little bit kinda looking at each other thinking what s going on  yeah you wouldn t expect someone to openly cry with all of his gym buddies around  ta so again this is specifically him which is what makes him a unique individual and a character that is worth following and observing for a film but i felt that he was sincere having tears in his eyes i mean we all started as hunters and gatherers we re all removed i mean look at us in a trendy hotel you know what i mean these guys do it as well i met him in vegas they all enjoy the leisures of the western world but i guess they want to taste some of the but it s also important to say that he does it hunting in the us throughout the year  there are definitely some parts of the us where it is unusual if one is not a hunter   ta i mean to me observing him we didn t show him in vegas or in environments other than his home but i didn t feel like he was comfortable necessarily in the venetian in vegas but he felt very comfortable in the bush with the indigenous people and that s another thing you know it was very hard to say whether you are observing colonialism or racism i believe that there is quite a bit of that i heard it from other hunters not from him aaron ever but at the same time you also watch them working together  that scene with the natives carrying him on a makeshift throne comes to mind they all seemed really proud of him  ta and he paid them a lot of money it s a relationship that we see in the western world between white people if i m your boss and i m paying you 20000 17000 a week then you re gonna love me unless i m really horrible  it was interesting to see the scene when aaron was video chatting with his girlfriend and he talks about his dog godzilla being the love of his life which is juxtaposed in front of his three trophy lions did aaron just say that out of the blue   ta yeah mostly yeah he initiated most of the situations to me i wanted to show a little bit of his private intimate life before we go to africa and it was important for me to make sure that he comes across as very human and normal and real whether you take the video conversation as being something demeaning for women or not that s your take but you know going on a trip for a long time he s speaking to his girlfriend and he s being loving in his own way in terms of the setting that s the guy s natural habitat you ve seen it here points to his bicep where aaron has a lion tattoo and if you watch those few scenes it s just lions all around it s almost to the point of being a character  and now you have on this lion hoodie   ta yes i am a lion i came prepared  i actually didn t find his comment demeaning to women because i have married female friends who they tell me that their dogs come before their husbands so it s just some dogowner or petowner thing   ta i love your approach i think that i believe aaron that he loves animals in my life it s a twisted way too i don t want to kill anything for any reason i don t want to be a hypocrite if you attack me with a knife right now i m gonna defend myself  and you re army trained so i better watch out  gabrielle almagor jva prison warden thomas gerdes and tomer almagor before their second screening of king of beasts at the oldenburg jva prison photo courtesy of renate schulze  i feel like with this film if animal rights activists and hunters go in with an open mind and give it a chance then they could get something out of it like you said it could open up more dialogue about not just trophy hunting but animal conservation as a whole it s too bad that some extremists on both sides of the fence might not even bother   ta i mean there is a head organization for wildlife protection called cites and they decide on species every year and stuff like that we ve learned these people are always in conflict inner conflicts they all stab each other in the back because it s very hard for them too and a lot of these people are animal lovers i m not going to assume that i know what is at the core of the people who are against trophy hunting we did go to demonstrations we wanted to show the other side we filmed in london cape town in tel aviv la of course new york so we filmed quite an extensive amount of footage with animal rights and wildlife activists a lot of what they say does make sense chris mercer in south africa tippi hedren i had an interview with her she s very onesided hardcore trophy hunting is terrible hunters should be shot she s very clear i don t know if she consumes meat or not but she s very clear she has a wildlife refuge she saves animals that were brought into the us like lions and leopards and now the owners don t want to deal with them that s a completely different thing there is a brilliant movie about that the elephant in the living room i think that again numbers are a dangerous zone but there s probably ten to twenty percent on the left side that is extreme that includes peta and groups like this you know peta not necessary as it s more domesticated animals but i m sure they have a strand in animal rights and then you have these same people on the right side that call those people bunnyhuggers and whatnot and will never speak but as he aaron says in the movie the middle chunk of the population he was saying we gotta sway their minds to our side i don t think that s the case the bottom line is hunting exists if we take out trophy hunting from africa if we take out that component i m sure that the void will be taken by extreme poaching as you can see the locals in the movie they don t like the animals  yeah i was going to ask about that i liked the little snippets that you included interviewing one mother and then some of the young men who were helping aaron she was saying that she doesn t like the lions because they come and attack the cows and attack people and the men were saying that they also don t like the lions either hunting them or if they re not prepared just running away from them   ta they like to hunt them for money for food you know if money was out of the equation food would be the main equation they would become poachers themselves if aaron never came again they would become poachers and kills the animals if there was no value then they would at least eat it then it becomes of value so that s the most important thing to understand we re outsiders we re foreigners we live in berlin or los angeles we have food in the supermarket if we make money to buy it or not that s our problem that s our problem our western problem we have our own problems but over there it s not about that they have to eat and they can t sit in the corner and beg so they can t even be homeless so to speakthey have to live off the land they have to do it one of the ways is trophy hunting now again going back to the intention of our movie and how we started it i m not advocating that every hunter in the world go and help the poor no not at all i think it should be done in a very balanced moderate way and an ethical way  along the lines of the code of ethics cowritten by aaron and dr paula white   ta i think so and i think in countries where lions are being hunted to extinction they should stop i don t have the perfect solution but in botswana for example gabrielle and i look up to beverly and derrick joubert they were able to ban all hunting and so the lion population is coming back lions can reproduce up to six times a year the lioness can become pregnant every two months yeah i ve learned all of these weird things i didn t know so that means lions can come back pretty quickly then you have to have another balance by the way that s another important thing that people forget there has always been some form of balance before colonialism or the white man local people were doing their own balance hunting or running away from the animals once colonialism took over they brought in more of a systematic way you know bush rangers have been in existence for a long time they were calling themselves conservationists people like willie de beer and anne claire from south africa these are the original conservationists these are africans that were also hunters that were calling herds for example you have a populated area with people and then you have these huge herds of elephants elephants take up so much space and they eat everything out of house and home in the area so you have to manage the animals what do you do with that i mean that s the thing it kind of opened my mind i didn t realize many of these things when you have all of these animals and all these people in a limited amount of space you have to do some management there are some ways to do it like they did in botswana where there is a smaller population of people there s land and they found ways to separate people and animals with the tribes and their cows and the lions they developed this system where there s a chip in the ear of the lion i think it s like a sonar system essentially whenever the lion gets too close to the cattle it gets rejected by this sound so moves away so then they find their food elsewhere it s important to mention that africa is huge even though there is a population growth like tanzania had 15 million people in the 1950s and now they have like 55 million that s a huge population growth it takes away the areas of the animals but there is still a lot of land africa is so much bigger than the us  right in size the us is at least three times smaller than africa  ta before i came down to meet you i read an article about ecosystems and what amount of land that we need to preserve and not touch and scientists talk about 50 of the world land and i think that it s still doable even with a billion people or the ten billion people that they project by 2050 they are saying by 2050 we need to protect 50 of our globe and keep it for animals and wildlife and whatnot but i think that it s still possible we have to all come together again obviously with lion trophy hunting there are things that shouldn t be done they shouldn t take the biggest they shouldn t completely drain the gene pool they shouldn t hunt younger lions the shouldn t eliminate prides the females so there s all of these things a lonely lion a lion no longer in a pride no one else is hunting for that lion and that lion is eighty years old in terms of lion lives so that lion is kind of thrown out it s ethically fine to hunt that lion i suppose that s what they were thinking about with cecil by the way cecil was thirteen years old but he was beautiful and a symbol and the funny thing is that i read interviews and i ve exchanged emails with the doctor and scientists from oxford who were tracking cecil the admitted that it was beyond the sensational uproar it was okay for cecil to be hunted it was just a very sad moment because that lion had a name he was beautiful  yeah when you humanize an animal people react differently   ta you know there is a whole brand of people who are called lion huggers people that hug lions there is kevin from south africa there are a few others i don t know what i feel about it i mean it s still wild animals it s beautiful to watch the connection between the wild animal and a human but i think that it potentially sends the wrong message that we can all go out of our car and go hug a lion  many people think that we as humans have the right to experience everything for ourselves without really questioning whether or not it is safe or good for the wild animals  ta exactly  so how was the actual experience in tanzania for you on a personal level not as a filmmaker   it was a horrific experience for me i did not like it one bit i mean honestly i m proud of the film for what it is as a cinematic achievement and i think that as something it will be eyeopening for both sides because not all hunters hunt ethically and whether this was an ethical hunt or not it s up to i don t know the age of the lion i m just going by what i was told at least you know all of the processes were explained whether via images or some words so it s kind of good for both sides and that was the main intention once we realized what kind of movie we were making the main intention was we want to show the process and what it takes and have people who can experience the experience and be there by the end of what they watch they can start a dialogue and be asking all these questions both sides talking about it and seeing if there is a way to resolve  there has been a lot of anticipation from this film six years is a relatively long time and three years after shooting was finished what can you tell me about the distribution of king of beasts when can audiences expect to see it released   ta the distribution rights were taken by gravitas entertainment our distributor and the film will come out in february 2019 we will go to theaters in the states in some kind of a limited release depending on the acceptance and then we will go worldwide on vod platforms  that s not bad do you already have other festivals lined up   ta we just got a few requests right now so we might do a festival tour but we knew ahead of time ahead of oldenburg that we were going to get released so the festivals are very important to us because that s when you actually get to meet other cinephiles people who really love cinema and have these intense conversations and whatnot but we are trusting that the worldwide release will get the movie to a lot of people who don t go to film festivals such as hunters that would be interesting to see  didn t you say after the premiere that aaron has not yet seen the final cut   ta aaron supports the message of conservancy and obviously he was with us and we watched some of the footage he understands where we are going  what can we expect for your next project is it a documentary   ta i m usually a fiction filmmaker this is a deviation from what i normally do as you said it was very cinematic and so forth i was enjoying making it because i felt like i was still making a fiction narrative film but my next project is called reciprocal beat and it s a crime thriller with a strong dramatic anchor and it s about a fatherson relationship it s a father who gets released from prison and wants to take his son on a fishing trip to reconnect his estranged son but it becomes this druginfused odyssey with many many bad people chasing them around and i d like to work with my son on this one the name of the character is shane and my son is shane so i make sure that he feels very assimilated to the character  in what stage of the production are you   ta we are pretty close we have some of the cast members i m not gonna mention names yet but we have some cast members are known talent we have most of our finance in place obviously screenplay breakdown all that stuff so we are almost there i decided to come back to my other reality  so are you based in la full time   ta yes gabrielle and i are based in la we have a production company it s called urban tales and we produce all kinds of movies smaller and bigger gabrielle kind of spearheads the producing and packaging and a casting subdivision so we cast inhouse as well  if you could sum up your overall experience with your film in three words what would they be   ta words are cheap eyeopening transforming and educational photo courtesy of oldenburg international film festival  this might be easier what three words would you use to sum up your impression of oldenburg   ta generous loving there is a lot of love especially the love from everyone who came to the festival putting the festival together for cinema lovers and filmmakers is amazing i spent a moment with deborah kara unger yesterday and i asked how are you and torsten able to not sleep for a month or more and she said we love you and i believe her i think that it s true i feel it so yes it s generous it s loving and i m trying to touch upon the word it s kind of punk rock it s anarchistic it s like in your face you see what i m saying the choice of films i ve been to quite a few festivals i feel like the curation is very much geared towards let s kick you in the face and bash your head and see what you think about it once you re done watching the film i didn t get to see enough movies we look at mandy on the one hand and even though it s crazy and experimental it s fairly commercial because it s still nicolas cage it s an a24 production and it s going into cinemas then we look at another film that i watched is that you eres tu papa a cuban film i didn t know what to expect and it blew my mind it s very visceral and slow but they are both in their way a punch to your face you have to acknowledge these films and think about them and talk about them so i think that oldenburg curates films that demand your attention  king of beasts trailer  from  tomer almagor  on  vimeo  usa tanzania 2018 director tomer almagor nadav harel screenwriters tomer almagor nadav harel cast aaron neilson producers gabriel almagor bryan gambogi salome breziner mark steele cinematographer nadav harel editor nadav harel research tomer almagor music simon taufique contact gravitas ventures release date february 2019 86 min english swahili with english subtitles world premiere  