This film was released on Friday 24th November 2017 and is no longer screening. 

This film is F-Rated. Find out more here.

Principally comprised of 50-year-old 16mm footage – until recently considered lost – Brett Morgen’s strikingly intimate portrait of renowned primatologist Jane Goodall is a fascinating window onto her early success, set to a typically mesmeric Philip Glass score.

In the 1960s, National Geographic sent cameraman Hugo van Lawick to document Goodall’s pioneering work with chimpanzees in Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park. A twenty-six-year-old with little training or practical experience, Goodall went on to triumph in the male-dominated field, challenging conventional research methods with her unique approach to wildlife observation.

Director Brett Morgen (Cobain: Montage of Heck, 2015) wisely allows Van Lawick’s astonishingly pristine material to tell the story of her formative years with the chimps in Gombe Stream. Her later role as an international campaigner for animal rights and conservation gains perspective from a new interview with the now eighty-three- year-old Goodall.

(Notes by David O’Mahony.)

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