Documentary Production and Distribution News

A New Season of Nature Begins with Siberian Tiger Quest, Wednesday, October 10, 2012 on PBS

By StudentFilmmakers.com
posted Sep 14, 2012, 13:31

Photo by Joe Loncraine; Mike Birkhead Associates; Courtesy of Thirteen.org. Chris Morgan and Sooyong Park walk many miles through this woodland in search of signs of tigers. Hopefully a fresh kill or tracks will lead them either to a sighting or help them to pick a spot for remote cameras.

Biologist Chris Morgan searches for the elusive animal in Russia's frozen forest.  

Hunted almost to extinction, the last wild Siberian tigers can only be found in the forests of the far eastern Russian frontier – but not easily.  And they had never been filmed in the wild, until one man went to new extremes in order to succeed where all others had failed.  Filmmaker Sooyong Park left friends and family in Korea to spend more than five years alone in the wild, confined for months in tiny pits in the ground or 4-foot hides in trees, watching and waiting for even a glimpse of the elusive creatures.  Then, in 2005, after incomprehensible hardship and devotion to his task, Park emerged from the frozen forests with over a thousand extraordinary hours of wild tiger footage that told the story of three generations of a Russian tiger dynasty.

Nature's season premiere, Siberian Tiger Quest, joins bear ecologist and conservationist, Chris Morgan, recently featured in Nature's Bears of the Last Frontier, as he travels to Siberia to meet with and spend time with Park, retracing his daunting journey, and learning first hand just how hard it would be to replicate Park's remarkable accomplishment.  Having tracked large predators in some of the wildest and most remote places on Earth, Morgan hopes to fulfill his own lifelong dream to find and film a Siberian tiger in the wild.

The film airs Wednesday, October 10, 2012 at 8 p.m. (ET) on PBS (check local listings). After broadcast, the program will stream at pbs.org/nature.

Nature has won almost 700 honors from the television industry, the international wildlife film communities, and environmental organizations including 10 Emmys, three Peabodys and the first award given to a television program by the Sierra Club.  The series received two of wildlife film industry's highest honors: the Christopher Parsons Outstanding Achievement Award given by the Wildscreen Festival and the Grand Teton Award given by the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival.  Recently, Fred Kaufman was named the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award for Media by the 2012 International Wildlife Film Festival.

Resources:

http://www.thirteen.org/