The award-winning South African documentary film STROOP – journey into the rhino horn war finished its international premiere run this past weekend with impressive wins in Europe.
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After leaving the US with a final win in Boston at the Mystic Film Festival for ‘Best International Documentary’, the film started its European premiere with a bang at the Wildlife Film Festival Rotterdam last week.
Selected to open the festival, the film secured another first by selling out the opening night. The choice of the South African film to open Europe’s prestigious wildlife film festival was a risky one, as the honour is usually given to a European film or an Oscar™ nominee but “the buzz around the rhino documentary made it a natural choice,” said festival director Raymond Laagerwald.
“We have followed the film’s progress through the years of filming and then seeing the final product, we picked it to open even before the Americans gave it so many awards, and that just confirmed what we already knew… that the film would do well here”.
The Dutch national broadcaster’s prime time news programme, Een Vandaag ran a feature about the film coming to the Netherlands which ensured a second sold out screening that the festival had put on to accommodate the hype around the film. It was no surprise then that the film won the coveted Flamingo Award, with the jury stating at the prize-giving ceremony: “This is an impressive and shocking film. The Jury believes the filmmakers, guided by the great main character Bonné de Bod, have managed to show us the immense complexity of the problem of rhino poaching. This body of work is a very powerful and emotional call to action.”