The Lion Hunters

Zac Weber

Rouch frames the lion hunt with an ethnographic lens as a way to examine the encroachment of modernity on tradition. I think I was most intrigued by the making of the arrows.

Eric Rucker

Dreamlike, poetic, terrible, beautiful, terrible. A surrealist fever dream, a newspsper report, a critique of killing and our fear of and attraction to animals. The magic of film, sadness of life and time fleeting, the courage, madness and cowardice of men. The sad world we have hunted into sickness with our poisons and arrows and abstraction. Metanarrative on our lack of biophilia in the stories we tell of nature.

Loz Loory

...And then some American pays a helicopter to fly illegally over a wildlife sanctuary so he/she can use their new AR-15 which they bought off the internet for a really good price... "The Lion Hunters" is an amazing historical document that makes one realize how rapidly industrialization has changed our lives. Now we can drive Tuareg SUVs. Is that progress?

thelastronaut

By framing the movie with the children listening to the hunters singing, Rouch elevates the film from a mere ethnographic film to one that comments subtly on encroaching modernity.

ejonline

I'm not making an ethical critique of a subsistence hunting culture - not my place - but I'm not sure what I learned by watching these animals die in somewhat real time. I can appreciate the urge to document the work of artisans crafting equipment and the skills of the hunters, but I was far more interested in how the hunt is turned into stories the men tell the children (and thus, themselves) than the hunt itself.

Jeff Heinzl

‘The Lion Hunters’ ends up as a meditation on tradition, the passage of time, and death. This doesn’t make it easier to watch a lion die or try to pull the arrow from her flesh. (She doesn’t succeed: a piece of wood just breaks off in her mouth, and the poison circles through her veins, relentlessly.) The film is not didactic’s opposite: everyone has something to say a reason to kill or so Rouch makes it seem.

I.Camera

A fascinating film about what is probably a lost world now, set in a region on the Niger-Mali border now inhabited by Jihadists. Tribesmen stalk and trap a pride of lions with bow and arrow over several days, the hunt built into the rituals and collective soul of that community traditions, so much so that its outcome is theatrically performed by the hunters at the film's end for the benefit of the tribe's young boys.

petit astronaute

(version 2K restaurée)