Gorillas in the Mist | |
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Directed by | Michael Apted |
Screenplay by | Anna Hamilton Phelan |
Story by |
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Based on | Gorillas in the Mist by Dian Fossey |
Produced by |
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Starring | |
Cinematography | John Seale |
Edited by | Stuart Baird |
Music by | Maurice Jarre |
Production company | The Guber-Peters Company |
Distributed by |
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Release date |
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Running time | 129 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Budget | $22 million [1] |
Box office | $61.1 million [2] |
Gorillas in the Mist [lower-alpha 1] is a 1988 American biographical drama film directed by Michael Apted from a screenplay by Anna Hamilton Phelan and a story by Phelan and Tab Murphy. The film is based on the work by Dian Fossey and the article by Harold T. P. Hayes. It stars Sigourney Weaver as naturalist Dian Fossey and Bryan Brown as photographer Bob Campbell. It tells the story of Fossey, who came to Africa to study the vanishing mountain gorillas, and later fought to protect them.
The film was theatrically released in the United States by Universal Pictures on September 23, 1988. At the 61st Academy Awards, it earned five nominations, including Best Actress for Weaver and Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium. The film won Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama for Weaver and Best Original Score for Jarre at the 46th Golden Globe Awards, where it was also nominated for Best Motion Picture – Drama.
Occupational therapist Dian Fossey is inspired by anthropologist Louis Leakey to devote her life to the study of primates. She writes ceaselessly to Leakey for a job cataloging and studying the rare mountain gorillas of Africa. Following him to a lecture in Louisville, Kentucky in 1966, she convinces him of her conviction.
They travel to the Congo, where Leakey and his foundation equip her to make contact with the gorillas, and introduce her to a local animal tracker, Sembagare. Settling deep in the jungle, Fossey and Sembagare locate a troop of gorillas, but are displaced by the events of the Congo Crisis and forcibly evicted from their research site by Congolese soldiers, who accuse Fossey of being a foreign spy and agitator.
Fossey is resigned to returning to the United States, but Sembagare and her temporary host Rosamond Carr motivate her to stay in Africa. Fossey establishes new research efforts in the jungles of neighboring Rwanda, where rampant poaching and corruption become apparent when she discovers several traps near her new base at Karisoke. Nevertheless, Fossey and her colleagues make headway with the gorillas, taking account of their communication and social groups. Her work impresses Leakey and gains international attention.
National Geographic , which funds her efforts, dispatches photographer Bob Campbell to highlight her research. Fossey, initially unreceptive, grows increasingly attached to Campbell after several photo sessions with the gorillas, and the two become lovers, in spite of Campbell's marriage. Campbell proposes to divorce his wife and marry Fossey but insists that she would have to spend time away from Karisoke and her gorillas, leading her to end their relationship. Fossey forms an emotional bond with a gorilla named Digit, and attempts to prevent the export of other gorillas by trader Van Vecten.
Appalled by the poaching of the gorillas for their skins, hands, and heads, Fossey complains to the Rwandan government and is dismissed, but a government minister (Waigwa Wachira) promises to hire an anti-poaching squad. Fossey's frustrations reach a climax when Digit is beheaded by poachers. She leads numerous anti-poaching patrols, burns down the poachers' villages, and even stages a mock execution of one of the offenders, serving to alienate some of her research assistants and gaining her various enemies. Sembagare expresses concern at Fossey’s opposition to the emergent industry of gorilla tourism, but she nonchalantly dismisses his worries.
On December 27, 1985, Dian Fossey is murdered in the bedroom of her cabin by an unseen assailant. At a funeral attended by Sembagare, Carr, and others, she is buried in the same cemetery where Digit and other gorillas had been laid to rest. Sembagare symbolically links the graves of Fossey and Digit with stones as a sign that their souls rest in peace together before leaving.
The epilogue text explains that Fossey’s actions helped save the gorillas from extinction, while her death remains a mystery.
Gorillas in the Mist started an exclusive run on 15 screens on September 23, 1988 and grossed $366,925. [2] It expanded to 558 screens the following weekend and was the number one film for the weekend with a gross of $3,451,230. [2] [3] The film went on to gross $24,720,479 in the United States and Canada and $36,429,000 internationally for a worldwide total of $61,149,479. [2]
The film received generally positive reviews from critics, with many praising both Weaver's performance and the technical accomplishments of the movie while some were frustrated by the lack of depth in Fossey's on-screen characterization. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes , 84% of 19 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 6.7/10. [4]
Hal Hinson of The Washington Post declared, "At last, [Weaver] may have found a part cut to her scale", adding "it's a great role for her to pour herself into, and she doesn't skimp." [5] However, he had his misgivings about the restrictions placed on Fossey's character: "The chief problem with Gorillas in the Mist is that it banalizes its heroine; it turns her into one of us. And by all accounts Fossey was anything but ordinary." [5] He also accused the filmmakers of toning down Fossey's unstable mental state: "Fossey was more than merely eccentric...The movie hints at these aspects of her character but tries to soften them;...the filmmakers have done more than sanitize Fossey's life, they've deprived it of any meaning." Hinson concluded that "Gorillas in the Mist isn't a terrible film, but it is a frustrating one." [5]
While Roger Ebert was also happy with the casting of Weaver as Fossey ("It is impossible to imagine a more appropriate choice for the role"), he felt the character was too distanced from the audience and that her development and motives were unclear. [6] He wrote that the film "tells us what Dian Fossey accomplished and what happened to her, but it doesn't tell us who she was, and at the end that's what we want to know." [6] However, Ebert was impressed by the scenes with the gorillas and the way live footage of gorillas was seamlessly blended with gorilla costumes: "Everything looked equally real to me, and the delicacy with which director Michael Apted developed the relationships between woman and beast was deeply absorbing. There were moments when I felt a touch of awe. Those moments, which are genuine, make the movie worth seeing." [6] Hinson also agreed that "whenever the cameras turn on the gorillas — who are the film's true stars — you feel you're witnessing something truly great." [5]
The film is recognized by American Film Institute in these lists:
Susan Alexandra "Sigourney" Weaver is an American actress. A figure in science fiction and popular culture, she has received various accolades, including a British Academy Film Award, two Golden Globe Awards, and a Grammy Award, in addition to nominations for three Academy Awards, four Primetime Emmy Awards, and a Tony Award. In 2003, she was voted Number 20 in Channel 4's countdown of the 100 greatest movie stars of all time.
Broadcast News is a 1987 American romantic comedy-drama film written, produced and directed by James L. Brooks. The film concerns a virtuoso television news producer who has daily emotional breakdowns, a brilliant yet prickly reporter, and the latter's charismatic but far less seasoned rival. It also stars Robert Prosky, Lois Chiles, Joan Cusack, and Jack Nicholson.
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Dian Fossey was an American primatologist and conservationist known for undertaking an extensive study of mountain gorilla groups from 1966 until her murder in 1985. She studied them daily in the mountain forests of Rwanda, initially encouraged to work there by paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey. Gorillas in the Mist, a book published two years before her death, is Fossey's account of her scientific study of the gorillas at Karisoke Research Center and prior career. It was adapted into a 1988 film of the same name.
The Accused is a 1988 American legal drama film directed by Jonathan Kaplan and written by Tom Topor, loosely based on the 1983 gang rape of Cheryl Araujo in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Starring Jodie Foster, Kelly McGillis, Bernie Coulson, Leo Rossi, Ann Hearn, Carmen Argenziano, Steve Antin, and Tom O'Brien, the film follows Sarah Tobias (Foster), a young waitress who is gang raped by three men at a local bar. With the help of District Attorney Kathryn Murphy (McGillis), she sets out to prosecute the rapists as well as the men who helped induce the assault. Principal photography began in Vancouver on April 27, 1987, and concluded on June 22.
Volcanoes National Park is a national park in northwestern Rwanda. It covers 160 km2 (62 sq mi) of rainforest and encompasses five of the eight volcanoes in the Virunga Mountains, namely Karisimbi, Bisoke, Muhabura, Gahinga and Sabyinyo. It borders Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Mgahinga Gorilla National Park in Uganda. It is home to the mountain gorilla and the golden monkey, and was the base for the primatologist Dian Fossey.
Stuart Baird is an English film editor, producer, and director who is mainly associated with action films. He has edited over thirty major motion pictures.
The Karisoke Research Center is a research institute in Rwanda's Volcanoes National Park. It was founded by Dian Fossey on 24 September 1967 to study endangered mountain gorillas. Fossey located the camp in Rwanda's Virunga volcanic mountain range, between Mount Karisimbi and Mount Bisoke, and named it by combining the names of the two mountains.
Madame Sousatzka is a 1988 drama film directed by John Schlesinger, with a screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. It is based upon the 1962 novel of the same name by Bernice Rubens.
The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International is a charity for the protection of endangered mountain gorillas. The Digit Fund was created by Dr. Dian Fossey in 1978 for the sole purpose of financing her anti-poaching patrols and preventing further poaching of the mountain gorillas. Fossey studied at her Karisoke Research Center in the Virunga Volcanoes of Rwanda. The non-profit fund was named in memory of Fossey's favourite gorilla, Digit, who was decapitated by poachers for the offer of US$20 by a Hutu merchant who specialized in selling gorilla heads as trophies and gorilla hands as ashtrays to tourists.
Rosamond Carr was an American humanitarian and author.
Amy Vedder is an ecologist and primatologist involved in conservation work with mountain gorillas.
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Ian Michael Redmond OBE FZS FLS is a tropical field biologist and conservationist. Renowned for his work with mountain gorillas and elephants, Redmond has been involved in more than 50 documentaries on the subject for, among others, the BBC, National Geographic and the Discovery Channel. Redmond was also involved in the 1988 film Gorillas in the Mist, spending some time with Sigourney Weaver so she could better understand her character.
Robinson McIlvaine was an American career diplomat who was President of the African Wildlife Foundation from 1978 to 1982.
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