The story shocked the world 10 years in the past: the Copenhagen Zoo’s determination to euthanize a wholesome two-year-old giraffe named Marius as a result of they thought of it a “surplus animal.” CNN reported on it. So did Le Monde in France, the U.Ok.’s Guardian and The Independent, and the Irish Times.
The New York Times wrote on February 9, 2014: “Marius the reticulated giraffe died at the Copenhagen Zoo on Sunday. He was 2 years old. The cause of death was a shotgun blast, and after a public autopsy, the animal, who was 11 feet 6 inches, was fed to the zoo’s lions and other big cats.”
Marius the giraffe on the Copenhagen Zoo days on February 7, 2014, earlier than he was euthanized.
KELD NAVNTOFT/AFP by way of Getty Images
A decade after the loss of life of Marius, the CPH:DOX pageant in Copenhagen hosted the world premiere of Life and Other Problems, a documentary that makes use of the case of Marius to ponder the interconnectivity of species, and life on Earth. The movie is directed by Max Kestner, who asks deep “existential questions,” the CPH:DOX program observes: “What is life? Does consciousness exist? Where does love come from? And last but not least: How does it all fit together – like, really? With curiosity and an open mind, Kestner embarks on a philosophical journey around the world to find answers to his questions.”
Among the many individuals interviewed within the movie are Bengt Holst, the Copenhagen Zoo’s scientific director who made the choice to place down Marius, regardless of affords from world wide (even from Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov) to undertake the animal. For Holst, it was a matter of precept. Marius’s genes have been properly represented in European zoos, he stated, and the teen (a two-year-old is an adolescent in giraffe phrases, Holst says within the documentary) had been rejected by his household as a result of, Holst says, he was in impact taking over too many assets. If I interpreted him accurately, he believed protecting Marius alive was an unnatural act, as a result of within the wild he would have been “selected out” in an evolutionary/Darwinian sense.
Director Max Kestner on the world premiere of ‘Life and Other Problems’
Matthew Carey
Animal rights activists accused Horst of callousness, they usually inundated him with loss of life threats. Kestner doesn’t take a prosecutorial strategy in his documentary, both vis-à-vis Horst or his detractor-attackers. He needs to situate the controversy in a vastly bigger context. By interviewing specialists in microbiology and different scientific fields, a way emerges that we ought to think about that life quantities to a relentless strategy of recycling and reorganizing of itself, from the extent of cells on up. We’re all composed of the identical supplies generated by the Big Bang (to amend Shakespeare, we’re not the stuff desires are made on, however the stuff the universe is made on). Each natural creature is expounded to each different. The loss of life of a single creature, by pure or unnatural means, takes on a unique shading from this perspective. Why obsess over a ripple inside a cosmic sea?
One knowledgeable remarks within the trailer beneath, “If we try to understand the world as a collection of individuals — we’re not going to get very far.”
The movie made me consider an commentary made by mythographer Joseph Campbell in a PBS collection constructed round his conversations with Bill Moyers. At one level, he instructed Moyers that life exists by “eating and devouring itself.” Life, as a organic, thermodynamic power, requires its personal substance to gas itself. In order to stay, we kill. That is why Holst fed Marius’s carcas to the lions.
Producer Vibeke Vogel (with microphone) on the world premiere of ‘Life and Other Problems’ at CPH:DOX. To her left is co-producer John Archer.
Matthew Carey
The inspiration to do a documentary on the loss of life of Marius and that story’s bigger significance got here from producer Vibeke Vogel.
“I was so fascinated about the story and how, to me, it said so much about how we connect to other species,” Vogel instructed Deadline after the world premiere on the Grand Teatret in Copenhagen. “And it was also a very colorful story with so many interesting people who chipped in with their opinions.”
Vogel and Kestner collaborated on a earlier the movie, the 2004 documentary quick Max by Chance (Rejsen på ophavet), which raised completely different philosophical questions than Life and Other Problems.
“It was all about, is it all a coincidence, life?” Vogel defined. “And now [Life and Other Problems] is like everything is connected. I think that is the beauty of this film, and I think it’s a feel-good film about how, if you go deep enough, we are the same.”
Demonstrators outdoors the Copenhagen Zoo on Feb. 9, 2014, the day Marius the giraffe was killed.
KASPER PALSNOV/AFP by way of Getty Images
Underscoring that time, the director makes use of strains from John Donne’s extraordinary 17th century poem”For Whom the Bell Tolls” (voiced within the movie by Orson Welles): “No man is an island/Entire of itself./Each is a piece of the continent,/A part of the main… Each man’s death diminishes me, For I am involved in mankind.”
The group of residing beings (not simply mankind) is a part of the identical continent, to borrow the Donne metaphor. We are part of unity that hyperlinks people, giraffes, chimpanzees, orcas, flowers, bushes and all natural substance. That can encourage us to guard particular person animals, or maybe we must always take into consideration our collective future as creatures embedded in a continuum of billions of years of evolutionary time.
Life and Other Problems will debut in Danish on Thursday. DR Sales is dealing with worldwide gross sales. The movie is written and directed by Max Kestner and produced by Vibeke Vogel. The co-producers are John Archer, Axel Danielson, and Maximilien Van Aertryck.
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