With Support From Tiffany & Co., Virtual Reality Project, "My Africa," To Premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival
Conservation International's newest virtual reality project, "My Africa," has been selected to premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, April 18-29, in New York. Narrated by the Academy Award-winning and Kenyan-raised actress Lupita Nyong'o, "My Africa" transports viewers to Kenya, where a community is reknitting the bonds that have long enabled people and wildlife to coexist.
"My Africa" will be released worldwide in seven languages on April 30, immediately following its run Tribeca Film Festival Virtual Arcade, April 20-28. The project was produced by Passion Pictures in association with Vision3 and with the support of The Tiffany & Co. Foundation. Additional support for distribution was provided by glassybaby.
The project opens with iconic wildlife scenes: Viewers stand in the midst of a thundering herd of wildebeest migrating across the Mara River, in front of a lioness as she captures her prey, and later, with an inquisitive baby elephant in a community-led sanctuary in Northern Kenya.
But "My Africa" is ultimately a story about people. A young Samburu woman named Naltwasha Leripe, narrated in English by Lupita Nyong'o, takes viewers through her community's daily life, tending livestock, digging "singing" wells deep into dry riverbanks and rescuing a baby elephant orphaned by a poacher's gun.
Directed by four-time Emmy winner David Allen, the project was captured with virtual reality cameras in the Namunyak Wildlife Conservancy in Samburu County of northern Kenya at the Reteti Elephant Sanctuary, the first elephant orphanage in Africa owned and operated by the local community. In a region where conservation has traditionally been pursued by wealthy outsiders, Reteti and the surrounding Northern Rangelands Trust offer a different model -- one grounded in local leadership and traditional knowledge.