On Wednesday, April 25, 2018 at 5:30 p.m. Bushtracks Expeditions hosted a private screening of the film Vanishing Kings: Desert Lion Legacy in San Francisco with African filmmakers Will and Lianne Steenkamp on hand to answer questions about their award-winning documentary.
With fewer than 120 desert lions remaining in the world, this lion population is one of the world’s most vulnerable, while epitomizing the species’ impressive adaptability in one of the world’s most famously unforgiving landscapes.
Set amid Namibia’s rugged mountains, majestic sand dunes, endless gravel plains, and the beaches of the Skeleton Coast, this fifty-minute documentary follows five young male lions on a fascinating and dramatic journey of survival in the world’s oldest desert. To create this in-depth film about a specific pride, the filmmakers spent over two and a half years following the lions, and worked closely with Dr. Philip Stander, the Namibia-born, Cambridge-educated conservationist considered to be the world’s foremost expert on desert lions.
Well-received in both the film and African lion conservation communities, Vanishing Kings: Desert Lion Legacy recently received first prize in the ‘Science and Behavior’ category at the International Big Cats Festival — a partnership between the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) and the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival. The film will broadcast later this year on Smithsonian Channel under the title King of the Desert Lions and is a co-production by Into Nature Productions, Boksdocs and Interspot for Smithsonian Channel, ORF and Arte.
Filmmakers Will and Lianne Steenkamp have dedicated their lives to producing exceptional, meaningful, wildlife films. Combined they have filmed, directed and/or produced more than 143 hours of wildlife programming and have lived and worked in several countries including Zambia, Namibia, South Africa, Cameroon, Madagascar, Tanzania and Malawi. They currently live in both Zambia and Namibia, working on several long-term film projects.
The camps featured in the film can be visited in our Namibia’s Red Dunes and Rhinos safari.
Interested travelers joined us to meet Will and Lianne Steenkamp in San Francisco on April 25, 2018 at 5:30 p.m. at the San Francisco’s Presidio, to learn about their experiences filming the desert lions and their thoughts on African lion conservation. Please contact us if you would like to be notified of our upcoming events in the future.
The first version of this article was posted on 30 Mar 2018 at 1:26 PM.