Despite numerous film projects, Jane Goodall has never before been willing to work so closely with a director and give audiences such an exclusive insight into her eventful life.
“Jane’s Journey” is the fascinating story of one of the best-known, most unusual and most important women of our time. Her biographer Dale Peterson calls her “the woman who redefined man”.
Over the past five decades, numerous films have been made about Dr Jane Goodall and her work with the chimpanzees of Gombe. Until now, however, none of these films has explored the private person behind the world-famous icon Jane Goodall, or the extreme highs and painful lows of her moving life story.
Over the past three years, Munich filmmaker Lorenz Knauer has succeeded in developing a very personal and trusting relationship with Dr Goodall. He has accompanied her on several journeys in Europe, America and Africa, experiencing at close quarters the intensity, restlessness and seemingly inexhaustible energy with which she follows her path.
Now nearly 75 years old, she travels around the world for more than 300 days a year, like the manager of a multinational company. Since 2002 she has also been a UN Messenger of Peace. She wants to show people not only why there is no more time to lose, but also how every one of us can act here and now to stop the continuing destruction of planet Earth.
Jane Goodall conveys a message of hope in her appearances. Thanks to her gentle but insistent charisma, she communicates it with such intensity that audiences are often moved to tears.
More than 20 years before the three-part UN report in spring 2007 dispelled the last doubts that humans are largely responsible for the rapid acceleration of climate change, Jane Goodall had already begun to transform her own life radically. Instead of continuing her almost fairytale career as a primate researcher in the forests of Tanzania, she began devoting all her energy to protecting the environment.
Jane Goodall achieved this in part by founding the youth organisation Roots & Shoots, which is now active in almost 100 countries and provides children and young people with a platform for taking direct, independent action to preserve the foundations of life.
Jane Goodall sums up her view in a few words: “There is a saying you often hear: We have not inherited this planet from our parents; we have borrowed it from our children. We have borrowed nothing! We have stolen it and continue to steal it! And we must do something to change that!”
During her exhausting travels and the few weeks she spends each year in her southern English home writing books, the portrait of this person becomes ever clearer: a woman who has placed herself wholly at the service of an idea and is prepared to give up almost everything a “normal” person in our society takes for granted. Although she constantly speaks before thousands of people, works with hundreds, makes films and gives interviews, she still lives almost like a hermit—today in hotel rooms rather than the simple army tent on the shore of Lake Tanganyika where, almost fifty years ago, she began her groundbreaking research entirely on her own.
Filming with Jane Goodall will begin in mid-2008. The camera will accompany her on her travels and portray both her and important companions in a very personal way. The film is scheduled for worldwide theatrical release in 2009. “Jane’s Journey” is a documentary project by Lorenz Knauer and a co-production between NEOS Film and Sphinx Media, supported by funding from FilmFernsehFonds Bayern and the German Federal Film Board.
