REVIEWS
80 | Sight&Sound | April 2019Reviewed by Hannah McGill
A close-up portrait of minor players in the Kenyan
ivory trade, the documentary When Lambs
Become Lions is ravishing to the eye, touching and
involving – even if its intense aestheticisation
of its subject and neat-and-tidy plotting carry
it some distance away from fly-on-the-wall
spontaneity. Director and cinematographer Jon
Kasbe filmed his three main characters over
three years. Asan, his cousin and childhood
buddy credited only as ‘X’ and their mutual
friend Lukas live in northern Kenya, where the
standoff over the illicit ivory trade has created
parallel industries of poaching and anti-poaching.
Asan has operated on the wrong side of the law
in the past, but now, as a married father, works
as a ranger protecting the wild animals. X is a
poacher, and Lukas his subservient sidekick.
The film emphasises similarities in the two
lifestyles: the rangers enjoy the thrill of the
chase, Asan asserting that “to catch a poacher,
you have to think like one”; and they don’t
stint on violence. No one talks much about
the importance of elephants or the morality of
poaching; it’s a matter of money for all concerned.
But even as Asan switches sides, supplementing
his income by passing information to thepoachers, one doubts that many viewers will
be persuaded by the vague insinuation that
the two pursuits are equivalent, or equally
justifiable. By X’s own free admission, no one
forces him to kill elephants. He acknowledges
that “there are other jobs”, but they’re not as
reliably lucrative, plus there’s the risk of him
having to do something repetitive and getting
bored. His father, he says, “died a nobody. I don’t
want to be remembered that way” – although
why you’d want to be remembered for helping
to make elephants extinct goes unexplored.
It’s a neat moral flourish that X doesn’t even
do the killing himself, but outsources it to the
gentle Lukas, whose encroaching illness initially
seems like his body’s outcry against the ugly
labour he’s found himself doing, but eventually
proves to be the more tragically prosaic HIV
virus. If the film’s evident management and
manipulation of encounters and conversations
in pursuit of narrative impact make it feel
somewhat less than authentic, the stark poetry
of its visuals – as when we see great heaps of
tusks burning in affirmation of the Kenyan
government’s clampdown on the ivory trade,
and then the strange ash structures they
leave behind – can take the breath away.When Lambs Become Lions
USA 2018
Director: Jon KasbeIn northern Kenya, ivory poachers are at constant
war with the rangers, who will shoot to kill in order to
protect dwindling elephant populations. Over three
years, this documentary follows Asan, whose work
as a ranger is marred by unpredictable payment; his
cousin and friend ‘X’, who has chosen the other side
of the moral and legal fence and poaches elephants
to order; and Lukas, who does the actual killing onX’s behalf, though a mystery virus is slowing him
down. With a new baby at home, Asan is tempted to
make money by assisting the poachers, but as the
government clamps down on ivory poaching, Lukas
retreats from the illicit work. Finally, so does X,
retraining as a ranger. A closing caption reveals that
Asan has left his ranger job and is in search of other
work, while Lukas has died of HIV complications.Produced by
Jon Kasbe
Producers
Innbo Shim
Tom Yellin
Andrew H. Brown
Director of
Photography
Jon Kasbe
Editors
Frederick ShanahanJon Kasbe
Caitlyn Greene
Music
West Dylan Thordson
Sound Design/
Re-recording Mixer
Paul Hsu
©Kasbe Films, The
Documentary Group
ProductionCompanies
A Kasbe Films
and Documentary
Group production
in association
with Fusion and
Project Earth
Supported by a
grant from the
Sundance Institute
DocumentaryFilm Program with
support from Open
Society Foundations
and JustFilms|Ford
Foundation
Supported by
the Mountainfilm
Commitment Grant
A film by Jon Kasbe
Executive Producers
Matthew HeinemanIsaac Lee
Erick Douat
Nicolás Ibargüen
Juan Rendón
Daniel Eilemberg
In Colour
[1.85:1]
Subtitles
DistributorDogwoof
Not submitted
for theatrical
classification
VoD certificate: 12
Running time:
75m 52sIvory merchant: When Lambs Become LionsCredits and Synopsisphysical and the psychic blur into one
another, the box and its mysterious contents
acquire a potency, while the soundtrack speaks of
Schrödinger. Another voice refers to the discovery
of some film in the belly of a whale, which seems
like a splash of Kötting’s trademark japery, until
a post-credits twist offers an uncanny moment of
mystical resonance and potential transfiguration.
Where 2017’s Lek and the Dogs drew Kötting’s
‘Earthworks’ trilogy to a close, The Whalebone
Box feels as if it is infused with the energy of
his entire filmography – perhaps akin to the
psychic energy Sinclair suggests is radiating
from the physical box as it travels the country.
Both film and box are finely crafted vessels,
harnessing the power of their materials. For
Kötting, this is a febrile collage of digital and
celluloid footage, archival imagery (including
from his own films) and found or repurposed
audio. Philip Hoare – whose aforementioned
non-fiction cetacean epic Leviathan or, The Whale
furnishes the film with its chapter headings – is
heard on the soundtrack unpicking the animal’s
cultural and historical significance. Elsewhere,
the vocals of performance artist and musician
MacGillivary manages to channel both a siren
song and a whale’s death throes into her haunting
lament. “Ah the world, oh the whale.”Over 30 years ago, the writer Iain Sinclair came into
possession of a whalebone box made by the artist
Steve Dilworth. This experimental documentary
charts the box’s transportation back to the Outer
Hebrides, where the whale was originally beached.Film
Andrew Kötting
Producer
Andrew Kötting
Cameras
Anonymous Bosch
Nick Gordon Smith
Iain Sinclair
Tony Hill
John Maher
Edit
Andrew Kötting
Sound
Andrew Kötting©Andrew Kötting
Production
Companies
HOME Artist Film,
Screen Archive
South East,
University of the
Creative Arts
Executive Producer
Jason Wood
In Colour and
Black & White
[1.60:1]Part-subtitled
Distributor
HOME Artist FilmCredits and SynopsisMotley crew: The Whalebone Box