A film about the now extinct male northern white rhino, Sudan is set to premiere at the upcoming 2019 Slamdance Film Festival.
“Sudan: The Last Male Standing” is a Kenyan film that will be premiering at the 2019 Slamdance Film Festival in the United States from January 25th to January 31st, 2019.
The riveting film about the story of a northern male white rhino named Sudan, who died on the 19th of March 2018, was selected as the only African film in the documentary feature category.
“Sudan: The Last Male Standing” is a feature documentary by filmmakers David Hambridge and Andrew Harrison Brown that journeys beyond the global headlines that have accumulated around Sudan, the last male Northern White Rhino in existence, and explores the painful emptiness of extinction through the eyes of Sudan’s three primary caregivers. Teetering on borrowed time and with his health in decline, Sudan’s looming death and the uncertainty of employment that it will bring hangs over the heads of our three dynamic characters.
Born in 1973, Sudan was a captive northern white rhinoceros who lived at the Dvůr Králové Zoo in the Czech Republic from 1975 to 2009, and the rest of his life at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Laikipia, Kenya where he lived under 24 hours armed protection from poachers.
Sudan’s death left just two female northern white rhinos on the planet; his daughter Najin and her daughter Fatu, who remain at Ol Pejeta. The only hope for the preservation of this subspecies now lies in developing in vitro fertilization (IVF) techniques using eggs from the two remaining females, stored northern white rhino semen from males and surrogate southern white rhino females.
A photo featuring Joseph Wachira, a Northern White caretaker, consoling Sudan, the last male Northern White Rhino, moments before his passing in March was listed as one of the top 10 photos of 2018 by Time Magazine.
