Project Detail

The Serengeti Rules

Synopsis

Beginning in the 1960s, a small band of young scientists headed out into the wilderness, driven by an insatiable curiosity about how nature works. Immersed in some of the most remote and spectacular places on Earth—from the majestic Serengeti to the Amazon jungle; from the Arctic Ocean to Pacific tide pools - they discovered a single set of rules that govern all life.
Now in the twilight of their eminent careers, these five unsung heroes of modern ecology share the stories of their adventures, reveal how their pioneering work flipped our view of nature on its head, and give us a chance to reimagine the world as it could and should be.
Official Selection Tribeca Film Festival 2018 - Spotlight Documentary - World premiere

Details

Year
2018
Type of project
Features
Running time
84 mins
Director
Nicolas Brown
Producer
David Allen; Story Producer: Catherine Watling; Natural History Producer: Joe Loncraine
Executive Producer
David Guy Elisco, John Battsek, Dennis WC Liu, Andrew Ruhemann
Editor
Andy R. Worboys
Screenwriter
Nicolas Brown
Director of Photography
Tim Cragg
Composer
Anne Nikitin
Principal cast
Sean B. Carroll, Tony Sinclair, Mary Power, John Terborgh, Jim Estes

Categories

Production Status

Production Company

An HHMI Tangled Bank Studios (US), Passion Planet (UK) production with support of Simons Science Sandbox

Passion Planet

c/o Passion Pictures
County House
33-34 Rathbone Place
London
W1T 1JN

Sales Company

Submarine Entertainment

197 Grand Street, Suite 6W
New York
NY 10013
USA

Page updates

This page was last updated on 12th May 2025. Please let us know if we need to make any amendments or request edit access by clicking below.

See also

You may also be interested in other relevant projects in the database.

Spacewoman Spacewoman

Director: Hannah Berryman

Year: 2024

A landmark feature documentary about astronaut Eileen Collins, the first woman to pilot and command the Space Shuttle. Eileen’s incredible journey starts with her smalltown beginnings, sees her smash through many glass ceilings, and culminates in four dramatic space shuttle missions, the last being possibly the most dangerous and most important of them all. At its heart the film is the moving human drama of one family, where a mother’s extraordinary career takes us straight to the big philosophical question of what is the level of acceptable risk in human endeavour? This film celebrates Commander Collins’ trailblazing NASA career which opened the way for women to become spacecraft pilots and commanders, and proved a perfect riposte to a previous generation of male astronauts who thought there was no place for women to lead the way in space. Official Selection DOC NYC 2024 - World premiere Official Selection CPH:DOX 2025 - European premiere

Third Person (Plural) Third Person (Plural)

Director: Aikaterini Gegisian

Year: 2023

A cinematic essay composed of over 200 postwar U.S. informational films and newsreels from the Library of Congress and the National Archives. What begins as an inquiry into America’s vision of early European integration becomes a feminist re-reading of the masculine gaze that shaped the postwar world. Through archival images once used to define ‘the global’ and ‘the other,’ the film exposes the links between Hollywood, propaganda, and the military-industrial complex in constructing Western modernity. By casting a female gaze on these histories, THIRD PERSON (PLURAL) challenges the authority of the archive and reveals the unseen many who inhabit it - the collective ‘third person’ who looks back at the camera.

Monsters Monsters

Director: Andy Field, Beckie Darlington

Year: 2025

Created in collaboration with local children in one of the most environmentally fragile areas of the UK, this experimental documentary repurposes the tropes of Hollywood monster movies to explore young people’s real feelings and fears through an imaginary framework. This fantasy apocalypse becomes a safe space for the children to reflect on adaptation, resilience and an uncertain future.