The Crimson Wing: Disney's African adventure adds new colour to the nature documentary

Published on Thursday 3 September 2009 19:34

IT'S rare these days for cinema to present audiences with something they've never seen before. But that's what Matthew Aeberhard, Leander Ward and Melanie Finn, co-directors and writer respectively of The Crimson Wing have managed to do.

The first big screen nature documentary to be released by Disney in nearly 50 years, their film also marks the first time the lesser flamingos of northern Tanzania and their salt-saturated breeding grounds in Lake Natron in the Rift Valley have been featured in cinemas.

"As we like to say, 13 people have landed on the Moon and fewer than that have been out on the soda flats," says Aeberhard, referring to the otherworldly landscape that provides the film with its stunning backdrops. "We were looking for something a little bit different and when you see a lake that turns red and has an active volcano on the southern shore and 1,000ft cliffs along its western side, we knew the story that was there – two million birds breeding on the salt flats with all this colour against them deserved a big screen approach."

Shot over 15 months, but in development for several years before that, the film certainly captures this world in vivid detail. Fuelled by a collective desire to subvert the lecture-orientated format of most natural history films – something Finn affectionately refers to as the "fact-based, Attenborough, voice-of-God approach" – it offers up a more mystical and poetic portrait of the birds, one that loosely appropriates the myth of the phoenix – fitting given the flamingos' fiery appearance – to trace their perilous life cycle in the only habitat in the world where they breed. "We wanted to turn nature into an event that was outside of human experience" says Finn. "But we also wanted to say that their journey is something we can relate to as humans struggling towards adulthood, struggling to change, struggling with death."

Eschewing the Disney penchant for anthropomorphising animals, the film doesn't shy away from depicting the indiscriminate cruelty of the natural world. Flamingo chicks that audiences – especially younger audiences – will likely coo over fall victim to salt anklets that hobble their progress, while others are savaged by predators such as marabou storks and hyenas. But it's all part of life. "We didn't want to belittle nature or turn it into sentimental mush," says Aeberhard. "We wanted to demonstrate to people that nature tells us stories that can mean something to us."

They certainly got their own taste of nature's extremities while making the film. Not only did the Ol Doinyo Lengai volcano erupt while they were there ("We managed to make that a pretty good character in the film," laughs Ward), they had to negotiate three months of production-threatening rain and the corrosiveness of the lake itself, which kept eating away at the hovercraft which they brought with them from Southampton in order to get close enough to the birds to film them. "The salt gets into every little cut or scrape and we were constantly worried about being stranded out there and finding ourselves 10km out with no way to get back," recalls Aeberhard. Given Aeberhard and Ward often had to spend hours at a time in small, specially constructed hides in order to get the footage, it wasn't exactly a comfortable experience, but it was a worthwhile one.

Aeberhard: "When you're looking out and seeing in amazing intimacy something that no one else has really seen before, it's a position of enormous privilege." What's more, unlike other areas like the nearby Serengeti where Aeberhard has spent much of his career working as a wildlife cameraman, there's no tourist infrastructure to get in the way. "It really is just you and the birds and that's a wonderful position to be in."

That may change of course. An increase in tourism to the area is certainly likely to be one of the consequences of The Crimson Wing and while that could, ironically, pose a threat to the beauty Aeberhard, Ward and Finn have captured, it could also turn out to be its saviour. The lake, which is not yet protected by law, is under threat from proposals to build a soda ash manufacturing plant nearby that could potentially wreck the delicate ecosystem and wipe out the flamingos. "Once it's ruined, it can't be undone," says Finn, "but the Tanzanian government funds a lot of its conservation through tourism, so if an area becomes worthwhile for tourism, it's more likely to have a higher conservation status."

"That was one of our reasons for making the film," adds Aeberhard. "We knew about these plans and we felt it was much easier for a development like that to proceed if no one knew about it. In Tanzania, tourism is conservation. The soda ash plan is not dead, but we've made progress and this film has helped."

&#149 The Crimson Wing is in cinemas nationwide from 25 September.