ALAOTRA - Endangered Treasures of Madagascar
ALAOTRA - Endangered Treasures of Madagascar
is a touching and at the same time informing documentary about wildlife, people and change in Madagascar. The land of Madagascar is only 0,4% of the entire world, but 20% of the world’s primates are native to the island. However, 90% of these primates are on the brink of extinction. One of them is the unique Lake Alaotran Gentle Lemur (Hapalemur alaotrensis), the so-called „Bandro“.
A team of Malagasy and European conservationists and researchers go out on an exceptional expedition to find this special lemur. The Bandro is the only primate that is permanently living in a wetland, and it is found nowhere else than in the marshes surrounding Lake Alaotra, the biggest lake of Madagascar. The expedition is not only a journey to the primates, but also a journey to the "many places of change" in Madagascar.
The Alaotra region is known as Madagascar’s breadbasket for being the most important rice production zone in the country. Here, the human population, has increased sevenfold in the past 50 years to currently 700,000. As a majority of the population is earning their living with farming or fishing, extended droughts and reduced soil fertility are pushing more and more people into the remaining wetlands for rice and fish production. This is coming at the cost of the marshes and results in constantly shrinking habitat for the critically endangered Bandro.
This documentary was produced in the realms of the Alaotra Resilience Landscape Project (AlaReLa), an SNF supported project by the Swiss Program for Research on Global Issues for Development (external page r4d program). The documentary is based on interviews with various stakeholders—politicians, farmers, fishers, villagers, elders, researchers—and displays the complexity of the Alaotra socio-ecological system. It covers topics of environmental degradation such as overfishing and marshland burning; mining, slash-burn agriculture, charcoal production, and rural livelihood challenges. The underlying theme is the future of the flagship lemur of the Alaotra, the Bandro, and the deterioration of its habitat in the face of global and local change. This movie disentangles the external page various dimensions of change, and it shows how tabletop role-playing games can help to better understand such growing complexity.
Credits
Documentary by Dr. Julia Dordel & Guido Tölke
with Dr. Lena Reibelt and Dr. Patrick Waeber
Director of photography: Guido Tölke
Produced by Dorcon Film
Executive producer: Dr. Patrick Waeber, Madagascar Wildlife Conservation; ETH Zurich
Contact for further information
Movie available for streaming here
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