Their trunks were flailing and we were ducking. Shot over six months, this 40-minute film covers the journey of an elephant family through seasons of devastating drought to torrential rain, back to peaceful plains again. Avery Brooks, an accomplished stage actor and director, narrates. Such displays of brute force might be expected from these massive animals. But the film also reveals gentler, less obvious traits that hint at an intelligence rarely before shown.
Elephants often pass by sets of elephant bones, for example, but occasionally they stop.
Then you consider perhaps it's memory, and as soon as you start talking about things like memory you can forget any pretense that they don't have some kind of corollaries to humans. They behave in ways that seem accessible to not just the human mind but the human spirit. The elephants also became accessible thanks largely to the efforts of the film's scientific consultant, Dr. Iain Douglas-Hamilton, a veteran zoologist who in the 60s made the first wild elephant behavior studies in Africa. He'd set out early each morning in a small Cessna plane, locate the elephant family and radio back their location. His knowledge and instincts allowed the crew to capture some of the film's most intense moments, like the time a threatened matriarch charged full bore.