This film was never supposed to exist.

We were deep in the making of our centenary documentary series, which at that point was going to be four parts. Somewhere in the middle of it, we realised that parts three and four wanted to be one thing rather than two, and when we combined them, we found ourselves having something we almost never have: extra bandwidth. A little unexpected room in a year that had been planned out strategically in preparation for our 100th birthday.

The decision about what to do with it was the easiest decision of the whole year. One hundred years of Londolozi, and at the centre of the story, the leopard. Of course we would make a film about the leopards. What we did not have was any idea of how.

We knew two things. We did not want to make a standard nature documentary, and we wanted to make art. Not a movie about a spotted cat, but something closer to a piece of art that spoke of mystery and dedication and wisdom. We were starting from art rather than from science, which is a lovely thing to say in a meeting and a genuinely frightening place to begin, because the science is not optional. Six decades of it. We were going to have to hold both in our hands through this process.

The plan became… to not have a plan

Normally a film like this takes months in development, sometimes years. You build the story first. You craft the narrative, you make sure everything is there, and only then do you let it inform the shoot: the shot lists, the schedules, the production plan and the whole scaffolding.

When we embarked on this project with our media partners, Fell and Company, it became clear very quickly that we could not work that way. Because tracking and finding a leopard in the wilderness is not formulaic and it is not structured. It is one of the most organic processes I know of. To build a rigid narrative and then go out and film it would have been dishonest to the thing itself.

So for weeks we met online and argued the merits of every angle we could think of, and in the end we decided not to force a square peg into a round hole. The story of the Leopards of Londolozi was going to have to unfold naturally. We were going to have to trust the process and let it.

It was a challenging time. What we eventually committed to was simply starting with ten days in the wilderness. The team would come to Londolozi and embed themselves in the village and in the wilderness. We would use the best gear we could get our hands on. And every single day we would go out into the unknown and see if we could find leopards.

And so we did.

10 days in the wilderness

Those first days were about becoming a team. We needed someone who knew the landscape and the leopards intimately. We were creatives and storytellers. We certainly were not guides. It was a done deal that Sean Zeederberg would join us, bringing his expertise along with him, and together we settled into an easy rhythm of being in the bush all day. There was nothing fancy about this time. We packed what we needed – snacks, a ramshackled umbrella for shade, sunscreen and all the gear we could fit onto the vehicle – and we stayed out for long hours at a time.

It was February, which is by far the hottest month in the bush. The conditions were tough, but we committed anyway, heading out very early each morning to race the heat, to catch the dawn chorus and to listen for the alarm calls that tell you there is a predator moving somewhere out there.

Those pre-dawn starts, with a small committed team who all wanted the same thing and a hot coffee in a flask, are still my favourite memories of the entire shoot.

The room

Once we had our eye in, we shut ourselves in a room with no distractions and just started beatboxing about what this film actually wanted to be. We had an intuitive feeling inside of us, and we needed a plan, or at least a spine, to bring it to life.

What we landed on first was a decision about what we would not do. We did not want to simply show the viewer things. We wanted to film in such a way that the viewer got a sense of what it is like to go out in search of a leopard. Not the leopard as the destination at the end of the sequence, but the act (and art form) of searching itself.

We had already made three documentaries for the centenary with big interview pieces, faces to camera, one or two voices carrying the weight of the story. But this story could not be told that way. The reason we can see leopards the way we can at Londolozi is because of many hundreds of guides, trackers, naturalists and staff, pulling together with their knowledge and their patience over decades. To hero one or two people would have been a misrepresentation of that collective effort.

So we settled on the idea of a visual and audible journal. We would interview as many people as we possibly could, collect a range of field recordings, and let the film be built from that tapestry of voices. Everyone represented, and no one lifted above anyone else.

The soundscape had to be its own departure too. Raw, with the natural sound coming through louder than any score. We wanted the alarm call of a kudu to sound like it was happening right in front of you. We wanted the viewer on an audio journey as much as a visual one, so that it feels like sitting in the vehicle with us, in the pre-dawn, waiting, hoping for the first sign that a leopard is out there.

Pressing record

With the footage capture well underway, we turned our attention to the interview collection process. The interviews were as unstructured as the tracking. We found a quiet space wherever we could to set up minimal recording gear, and just talked. Sometimes in an empty office, sometimes on a cooler box in a dry riverbed and sometimes from the driver’s seat of the vehicle, pulled up next to a waterhole watching a leopard drink.

What do leopards mean to you?

What is your first memory of seeing one?

What have you learned from a leopard?

How did we come to view them this way?

We pressed record and trusted that there would be gold in the responses, so we did not tailor things too aggressively. Like looking for a leopard, we had to trust that the wisdom of this story would surface through the process, and that we would get what we needed.

We got so much more than we expected. We interviewed everyone from Stoff Kane-Berman, Londolozi’s Managing Director, who started at Londolozi as a cub ranger, through to trackers and guides and staff who have been quietly undone by the presence of a leopard. It showed me that these animals have reached the people of this place more deeply than even I understood. Pulling out the commonalities across all those hours of recordings was a great privilege for me.

The other privilege was simply the time. Long, uninterrupted hours in a vehicle with Sean Zeederberg – a vastly experienced guide who knows these leopards intimately and never skipped a beat when we had a question about them during the long hours in wait – and with Londolozi’s trackers who have dedicated their careers to their craft. There is no course you can take that gives you that.

The rainbow, and the Ngungwe Female

There is one search I will carry for a very long time. A formative time in my 11 years at Londolozi.

Our mandate was to find as many leopards as possible in the 10 days together, and to capture their stories and footage of them in a respectful way. At one point, we were looking for the Ngungwe Female, who we knew had recently had cubs. She is a skittish leopard, and there is a reason for that. She was born during lockdown, in those eight months when we were closed due to the global shutdown on travel. Her habituation to vehicles and people happened differently from the leopards who grew up being viewed daily. She is less certain of us, and she is entitled to be.

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6

Ngungwe 3:3 Female

2020 - present

Born 2020 during lockdown to Piccadilly Female. Once skittish, now confident mother denning her first litter in Marthly's rocky terrain.

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We suspected she was denning near a prominent koppie to the north of Londolozi. But suspecting is not finding. We went back to that area over and over across multiple days, and every day we left without finding her. Under normal circumstances, we might have given up, but there was something in all of us saying stay the course; something will show us the way.

Then, on a morning after a summer rainshower, a double rainbow came up over the rocks. After a morning of tracking this female, we were sitting there admiring the rainbow and working out our next move when we heard an alarm call. No one took a breath for what felt like an eternity as we waited to see if the alarm would sound again. It did, and that call led us, after days of searching and waiting, to her den site. We waited there for hours more, and then her cubs came out to feed.

It was proof that hard work and knowledge and dedication and trusting your gut really do pay off. It was also the deeper lesson, the one the whole film is really about: a leopard will only ever allow herself to be seen if she wants to be, and if she feels safe.

The four acts

Through this process, the shape of the film came out of what mattered rather than out of a template, and it formed into four acts.

The Search. It begins where a game drive actually begins, in the dark, with the anticipation of maybe finding a leopard and the knowledge that nothing is ever guaranteed. Tracking is a practice of immersion.

A good tracker has to immerse themselves in the way of a leopard, anticipating rather than following. – Sean Zeederberg, Virtual Safari Host

And then, as Bron puts it:

When you finally find what you are looking for, time collapses. – Bronwyn-Varty Laburn, Fourth Generation Custodian

Presence and Proximity.The reward for the search is an agreement between human and leopard, and the time you are granted to sit with her. This act is about what that proximity does to a person.

It is more than just seeing them; it is being present with them. – Kirst Joscelyne, Londolozi Guide

Citizen Science. From wonder into the practical question of how any of this became possible. The Mother Leopard in 1979. Sitting back and choosing to be an observer rather than an invader. Six decades of slow, ethical exposure. Roughly eight hundred and fifty individual leopards recorded, and the longest-running leopard research project in the world, built by guests and rangers and trackers and staff who all became part of it.

The Internal Search. Finally, we move from science back into magic. Because the leopard is also a teacher, and the skills you need to track one are the skills you need to find your own true nature. Patience. Perception. A willingness to leave the road. That is the film’s real invitation.

Leopards are one of the great mysteries, and if you allow them, they can be your guide into the unknown. – Amanda Ritchie, Marketing Manager

Tracking as a metaphor for filmmaking

When our ten days were up, the Fell and Company team left the village, and Sean and I resumed our normal programming. We had experienced something unique together as a small crew, and we knew we had extraordinary base material. And, if nothing else, perhaps some of the most beautiful footage of leopards we have ever captured.

What both surprised me and proved to me that we were on the right track was what happened next. The process went fast. Suspiciously fast. Usually the edit from here takes a long time to come to anything that feels good. But for this film, it felt like something was intuitively guiding it, and we went through only one or two rounds of tweaks and feedback before we had the final piece. After all that uncertainty at the start, after all those weeks of not knowing how to begin, the film essentially assembled itself.

Which was the whole lesson, in the end. Feeling the fear of having no clear plan, no visible path and no real, clean first track, but trusting that the way would appear, much like the tracks of a leopard appearing in the sand ahead of you. That was the faith we needed. It is the same faith the trackers and guides of Londolozi have been practising here every morning and evening for 100 years.

Watch the original Leopards of Londolozi film, made in 2016, and see where this story began. Ten years later, and in celebration of Londolozi’s centenary year, we return to our love affair with leopards with fresh eyes, more footage, and a decade of leopard lineages to add to the story…

Into The Unknown was created to celebrate the importance of these sacred animals and the vast collection of people who came together to protect them, learn about them and find the best way to coexist with them in this wilderness. It is a story without end. There are lineages in it that stretch back to 1979 and forward into cubs that have not yet been named. If you want to meet them properly, and to follow the family trees that our guests and rangers have been quietly building for decades, come and find the Leopards of Londolozi.