The true story of Dian Fossey, the anthropologist who spent twenty years with the rare mountain gorillas of Rwanda, is an exhilarating film that begins in 1966 when she aggressively talked her way into a research job in Africa and ends tragically with her murder in 1985.
The murder is still unsolved, but the killer could have been anyone, for in her determined efforts to save the endangered gorillas, she terrorised the natives by pretending to be a white witch, and enraged the animal poachers who were capturing baby gorillas for zoos.
Passion turned to obsession, and in the best performance of her career, Sigourney Weaver captures every aspect of this amazing woman from tenderness to rage.
The dense jungle slopes and mist-shrouded mountains are exquisitely recorded in the actual locations where Fossey lived, worked, and died, and the scenes with the wild gorillas are more awesome than anything in Out of Africa (1985).
Dian Fossey
Sigourney Weaver
Bob Campbell
Bryan Brown
Roz Carr
Julie Harris
Sembagare
John Omirah Miluwi
Dr Louis Leakey
Iain Cuthbertson
Claude Van Veeten
Constantin Alexandrov
Mukara
Waigwa Wachira
Brendan
Iain Glen
Larry
David Lansbury
Kim
Maggie O’Neill
Rushemba
Konga Mbandu
Howard Dowd
Michael J. Reynolds
Batwa chief
Peter Nduati
Mme. Van Vecten
Helen Fraser
Director
Michael Apted
