Off The Fence (OTF) has announced the first sales for its latest feature-length documentary, Silverback, produced by OTF Studios in association with the BBC, France Televisions, Featuristic Films and The WNET Group. "We are proud to be recognized for our work in the natural history community at Jackson winning the Great Teton andthese pre-premiere sales indicate that Silverback will certainly win buyers and audiences around the world — and, in the process, help to raise awareness of the plight of these magnificent, critically endangered creatures," Stefanie Fischer said.
Pre-premiere deals for the 90-minute film, which will debut on the BBC and France Televisions on the 7th and 8th of January respectively have been closed with US streamer Xumo and three European public broadcasters: Austria’s ORF, Sweden’s UR and Finland’s YLE. Global interest in "Silverback" has been building since the Jackson Wild natural-history filmmaking festival in September, where it won three honors, including the Grand Teton Award for best-in-show documentary. It is the first major wildlife feature documentary to come out of OTF Studios since Netflix’s My Octopus Teacher, which won the 2021 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
"Silverback" follows Congo-born wildlife cameraman Vianet Djenguet as he joins the effort to protect his country’s critically endangered eastern lowland gorillas. OTF’s small film crew was granted unprecedented access to the Kahuzi-Biéga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to document the ‘habituation’ of a gorilla family. This challenging conservation process, which acclimatises gorillas to the presence of humans, is vital to eco-tourism, which generates the income needed to protect the world’s biggest primates from poaching, habitat encroachment and, ultimately, extinction.
Although primarily focused on the habituation of Mpungwe, a 250kg alpha-male gorilla, Silverback also documents Djenguet’s own family dynamic as he re-examines the role of the ‘silverback’ in his own life — his grandfather. "‘Silverback' started as a film about trying to save a species from extinction, but the director’s obs-doc approach allowed it to evolve into many unexpected directions, including the impact of poverty, ideas around identity, family and masculinity," Andrew Zikking, Managing Director of Off The Fence Studios, said. "However, it is first and foremost a natural-history film documenting the dangerous and at times distressing habituation of Mpungwe and his family.”