Why this film now?

Rubondo Island National Park is an experimental, radical chimpanzee re-wilding project which differs from anything else in Africa because of how it was done and who did it.

The biggest surprise is that this certainly unwise, definitely unscientific chimpanzee translocation has been a success for the chimpanzees. But the man behind it considered it a failure and his organization, the Frankfurt Zoological Society, was only able to finally walk away from the project in 2010.

Rubondo’s wild-born generations of chimpanzees are actually quite unaccustomed to — seemingly downright averse to — most close human contact. The Frankfurt Zoological Society which was run by Grzimek for decades and played a large part in bringing the chimpanzees to the island in the 1960s, gave up on a decades-long habitation project in 2011.

The park, this ark of Grzimek’s, should never have happened. The people who lived on the island should never have been forced to leave their home. This film will go into all that, but the focus on on the how it happened, and who this man is who took over an enormous island in Africa to start his own radical re-wilding experiment.