Amid the big African animals, giraffes were always my favorite. Hugely tall, beautiful coats, practically the definition of deliberate grace in their move. And like animals all over the world, nosotros humans are gradually driving them into extinction by the simple method of taking over their natural environs. No species tin can survive without its living infinite.
So that's one message this well-done documentary carries. It'due south familiar enough, but information technology's no less truthful and no less a tragedy. The other big theme is the story of the title character, Canadian naturalist Anne Innis Dagg. As a graduate student she went to Due south Africa to report these magnificent creatures in the wild in the early 1950's, and wrote what was so the definitive book on giraffe behavior and ecology. Shockingly, it remained the definitive volume for literally decades later. It's a surprise to realize that Anne, a determined and resourceful young woman, went to practice this on her own years Before other more famous naturalists like Jane Goodall or Dian Fossey. The film shows a good deal of original camera footage from her commencement major visit there (along with some well done re-enactments to make full in necessary bits of the storyline), and splices those sections in with filming from the present consisting of interviews with Anne Dagg, her daughter Mary, some colleagues both new and one-time, and Anne's render to South Africa to the aforementioned identify where she worked lx years ago.
Subsequently her enquiry work in Africa, Anne Innis (every bit she was then) married physicist Ian Dagg and took a faculty position at the Academy of Guelph while her husband was at the nearby University of Waterloo. They started a family unit. Simply Anne's professional career came to a screeching, grinding, permanent halt when she was denied tenure for reasons that half a century later can be seen every bit yet some other instance of papered-over misogyny. Appeals to the Ontario Human being Rights Committee met the same fate. Her cursory and promising career was over. To make things worse, hubby Ian died just at retirement age. In recent years, she has experienced something of a professional resurrection by the international community of giraffe biologists -- a relatively small but engagingly squeamish bunch of people who nosotros become to meet. A few of them actively sought out this rather mysterious woman who literally wrote the book in their subject field and so faded away.
My wife and I saw this at one of our local art cinemas, who ran a special serial of showings of the flick this calendar month. Anne Dagg herself was there to practise Q&A afterward with the audience (which by the way was total and enthusiastic). She's a gracious and matter-of-fact lady. Yep it's a different era now, things are genuinely better for women researchers, but equally she would concord, the worst of it is that the numbers of giraffes are even so going downwards. There are likewise many of us, and we aren't doing enough to relieve our fellow creatures on Earth.
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