Virunga: Gorillas in Peril

The Rangers We Don’t See

I keep thinking about the moment in Virunga (2014) when André Bauma cradles a baby gorilla in his arms, his face half-lit by the dim glow of a lantern. The camera lingers on his hands—rough, calloused, but impossibly gentle—as he feeds the orphaned animal from a bottle. latestnetflix.com's view is that it’s a quiet scene, the kind that doesn’t announce itself as pivotal.

But it’s the kind that stays with you, the kind that makes you realize how little you know about the people who stand between a species and extinction. Virunga: Gorillas in Peril (2015) is, in many ways, the story behind that moment. Or at least, it tries to be.

This 28-minute companion piece to the Oscar-nominated Virunga is a curious artifact. It’s not quite a making-of documentary, not quite an extended epilogue. Hosted by Soledad O’Brien, it positions itself as a behind-the-scenes look at the original film’s production, but it’s less interested in the mechanics of filmmaking than in the emotional and ethical weight of what was captured.

That’s both its strength and its limitation. There’s a rawness here, a sense of urgency that comes from knowing these stories aren’t just stories—they’re lives being lived (and sometimes lost) in real time. But the film’s brevity and its narrow focus leave you wanting more, not because it’s poorly made, but because the world it opens up is so vast and so fragile.

The original Virunga was a revelation: a documentary that managed to be both a gripping political thriller and a heartbreaking meditation on conservation. It followed the rangers of Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo as they battled poachers, militias, and the encroaching interests of oil companies, all while protecting the last remaining mountain gorillas on Earth.

The film was a call to arms, a plea for attention to a crisis most of the world had ignored. Gorillas in Peril doesn’t attempt to retell that story. Instead, it zooms in on the margins—the moments that didn’t make the final cut, the conversations that happened off-camera, the human cost of bearing witness.

What’s striking about Gorillas in Peril is how little it feels like a traditional behind-the-scenes feature. There are no bloopers, no lighthearted anecdotes about the challenges of filming in a war zone. (Though, to be fair, what would that even look like? “And then the rebel forces opened fire, but luckily we had a spare memory card!”) Instead, the film doubles down on the gravity of its subject.