Gaspard Renault

Edges of the Forest is a feature-length documentary film emerging from and extending a visual anthropology study of wildlife rehabilitation practices in Bolivia. It follows Rusber, a Bolivian animal caretaker, as a highway construction project forces the relocation of the primate sanctuary where he was adopted and raised. As the move unfolds, his loyalty to his adoptive mother and to the animals in his care comes into tension with his own professional ambitions and personal desires. Through Rusber’s journey, the film explores and interrogates some of modernity’s foundational divides—human and animal, wild and domestic, protection and exploitation. More specifically, it examines how interspecies bonds are entangled with the social, political, and environmental forces shaping Bolivia’s tropical forest landscapes, and advances a case for a multispecies cinematographic anthropology.