Sacred Planet: Earth Steals the Show on the Big, Big Screen

Stefan Lovgren
for National Geographic News

April 22, 2004

To Jon Long, visiting the San people, or bushmen, living in the stark
Namibian desert was like stepping into an ancient culture. "These people
have maintained much of their way of life for thousands of years," he
said. "It was overwhelming."

Long is the Canadian director of the new giant-screen movie Sacred Planet, which opens today—Earth Day. He had never been to Africa before shooting part of his new film. There, he was struck by the importance of sharing among the Bushmen.

"Sharing is so ingrained in their culture that they don't even have a word for 'thank you,'" he said. "It's just a given that you would share what you have with everyone else."

Namibia was just one of several remote locations the team visited. The film also features some awe-inspiring cinematography of old-growth forest in British Columbia, glaciers in Alaska, red rock canyons in Utah and Arizona, rain forests in Borneo, ancient ruins in Thailand, and white sand beaches in New Zealand.

The narrative, meanwhile, is mainly a compilation of interviews with elders from indigenous cultures of these places, who speak about their connection to nature.

"A reccurring thing we found was that most of these indigenous people looked at themselves as being part of nature and not being on Earth to control nature or be above it," Long said in a telephone interview from Nelson, British Columbia. "Their common bond is their respect for the environment."

Earth's Splendor

Long came up with the idea for Sacred Planet during his last giant-screen film, the successful Extreme, which depicted the relationship between athletes and nature.

Together with his future wife, Karen Fernandez Long, he started researching and writing Sacred Planet in 2000. Filming, which began in 2001 and required seven months of work over a ten-month period, took the crew to some of the most pristine locations in the world.

"We tried to look for the most beautiful places we could find but also the most diverse," Long said. "So there's red rock, rain forests, mountains, and oceans."

Long says he wanted to raise public awareness about the environment by focusing on the Earth's splendor.

"Rather than showing the destruction happening around the world, we thought it would be a powerful way to make people think about the environment if we show them some of the beautiful places around the world that still exist," he said.

Buzzing With Life

One of the most breathtaking experiences, Long says, was filming in the rain forests of Borneo.

"At dusk, the insects make so much noise that it's louder than standing on the street corner in Manhattan," he said. "You have this sense that there is so much life around you."

At one point the filmmakers went looking for proboscis monkeys, famous for their huge noses and potbellies. Traveling in two canoes tied together with a ladder that held the camera at treetop level, the crew was startled when a group of monkeys suddenly started jumping out of the trees, across the river. It's one of the most spectacular scenes in the film.

Between each segment on an indigenous culture is time-lapse footage of modern city life and speeding traffic.

"We wanted to juxtapose the images of modern cultures with the traditional cultures," Long said. "But this is not to make a statement that modern society is bad compared to traditional cultures. The pictures of modern culture are not necessarily ugly pictures."

Still, Long believes indigenous cultures are disappearing because modern society and industry are encroaching on them through pollution, urban expansion, and environmental degradation. At the same time, traditional cultures may also be drawn to modern society.

"We found this to be especially true with the younger people," Long said. "In some indigenous villages that we visited, there were only elders left. These older generations are sometimes the last people who will live a traditional way. This is a time in history when there are few traditional cultures left."

Going Extinct

To illustrate how fast indigenous cultures are disappearing, consider the rapid loss of languages. At least 2,500 of the world's 4,000 indigenous languages are in danger of immediate extinction.

"You can't sequester a tribal people in a zoo, but what you can do is change the way the world in general honors and respects the place of different cultural voices in the patrimony of humanity," Wade Davis, a National Geographic Society explorer-in-residence and expert on struggling cultures, said in a recent interview.

"The best way to do this is through storytelling … to celebrate these cultural practices," Davis added. "Just to know [these cultures] is to be dazzled."

Long says indigenous cultures can teach modern society important lessons about belonging.

"Indigenous people talk about community, family, and a feeling of place," he said. "In modern life, you can have that feeling of community if you live in a place where you can actually walk to the places you need to go. Building communities that allow us to live our lives without getting into a car every time we leave our house is just one way that we can apply this [traditional] philosophy in a modern way."