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Virunga in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is Africa's oldest national park, a UNESCO world heritage site, and a contested ground among insurgencies seeking to topple the government that see untold profits in the land. Among this ongoing power struggle, Virunga also happens to be the last natural habitat for the critically endangered mountain gorilla. The only thing standing in the way of the forces closing in around the gorillas: a handful of passionate park rangers and journalists fighting to secure the park's borders and expose the corruption of its enemies. Filled with shocking footage, and anchored by the surprisingly deep and gentle characters of the gorillas themselves, Virunga is a galvanizing call to action around an ongoing political and environmental crisis in the Congo.
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Directed by Orlando von Einsiedel
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CinemaSerfAug 9, 2026
This is essentially about the sterling efforts made by the conservation rangers in the Virunga national park in what is now the DR of Congo but it quite quickly expands from their work to illustrate just how inconsequential preserving a tribe of gorillas was when armed soldiers began marauding about the place parading their astonishing array of heavy weaponry and indiscriminately wreaking death and destruction as they went. That's as well as the poachers who reckoned that by… Read more
eliminating those protected species, the park would be abandoned and finally there's the international industrial concerns who care little for their obligations to conservancy - egged on, at least under the radar, by blind eyes being turned globally, nationally and locally too. The camera crew show considerable daring as they follow these courageous and often quite emotionally invested workers into some seriously perilous territory and we are not spared some shocking imagery of the brutality inflicted upon many of the animals - particularly one rhino, so this isn't for the squeamish! Like so many similar documentaries, it does present a rather one-sided narrative which is a bit of a shame as I'd like to have seen more from both the government and the oil industry by way of explanation and defence of an environmental strategy that is clearly venal in the extreme, but that also doubtless might bring jobs and opportunity for a subsistence nation that is still reeling from the ravages of decades of human conflict and that may well have proponents too. This is a country that has been fought over and exploited for generations and after watching this you sort of hope against hope that perhaps those days are over. I'm not sure they are, though.