Local Student-Led Film Screens The Fight To Bring Back The California Grizzly Bear
SANTA BARBARA, Calif. (KEYT) – Despite being an iconic California symbol, the grizzly bear has been practically extinct in the state for a century now. A new student-led film premiering at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival highlights the growing effort to recover the species.
The documentary film, The Bear Beneath, by director and UC Santa Barbara student Olivia Hille, producer Jorge Rodal Llano, and filmmaker Tatum Davis centers around the untold story of overhunting and habitat destruction that led to dwindling numbers in grizzly bears.
UCSB researcher Peter Alagona is featured in the film as an environmental expert, who continues the work and education to ramp up recovery efforts.
"He's the number one grizzly researcher – probably in the world, yeah. And he is brilliant, he's passionate, he's genuine, we put him on as the subject really for this documentary and I just feel like the story wrote itself because he's just so true to what he has to say and so intelligent," says Hille.
The documentary was shot and completed as part of the Carsey-Wolf Center’s GreenScreen environmental filmmaking program. From pitch to delivery, the project was completed in just 10 weeks, the length of one academic quarter at UCSB.
"I just feel like documentary-filmmaking is just the perfect way to capture a moment in time, and I think in this moment we able to bring awareness to this topic and also hopefully promote people actually taking action," says Davis.
The trio says they hope the film spreads to greater audiences, and inspires the community to do better.
"We want the grizzlies back! That's the very first thing," says Rodal. "We're going to have to keep working on films that are really important, that are talking about what's happened here so we don't commit the same mistakes in the future, environmentally."
The film premiered for the first time on Feb. 11th at the Film Festival. Another screening is scheduled for Friday afternoon at 2:40pm.
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