Best Documentary
Botswana, Escaping Drought | Deadliest Journeys
In Botswana, the real life of the inhabitants is far from the usual postcard image. CHAÏDI, MONTY, MAREKO, SEKERE live in the heart of a country that is nothing but a great desert: Botswana. All are struggling to keep their jobs and support their families, but in the fine sand present everywhere, it is impossible to move forward without four-wheel drive. With tens of thousands of wild animals like lions or elephants roaming free, breaking down is not reassuring. Usually, once a year, only the OKAVANGO delta which flows into this desolation brings them some freshness and vital resources. But this year the water did not come.
Drought seriously threatens the lives of inhabitants and animals. The struggle for survival intensifies and global warming accentuates all the problems. Between elephants and farmers like Monty it's a merciless war for water. Making these domestic animals drink becomes a way of the cross and the herds pass away. In an atmosphere of apocalypse, Lake NGAMI has changed its face. Having become a vast puddle of mud, MAREKO fights there to catch the last catfish in the middle of the hippos stuck in a suffocating mire.
To deliver food to his grandmother, CHAIDI, penniless, walks for hours on a track crushed by heat. At the end of the road, hungry children are waiting for his packet of sugar. In Botswana, the whole organization of society linked to livestock farming and consumption is threatened by the terrible effects of global warming. Yet in the Kalahari Desert SEKERE and his wife MOGATLANYANA, the oldest representatives of southern Africa known as the Bushmen, still remember how to live in harmony with nature using water from roots and dew . Freedom-loving, they try to return in an old pick-up to the land of their ancestors from which they were expelled.
Directed by Philippe Lafaix
Published Dec 7, 2022
