Grasshopper Republic

Every rainy season, deep in the mountain forests of western Uganda, one of the world’s greatest natural phenomenon takes place. Millions, sometimes billions, of Long-horned Grasshoppers swarm together to mate in a rarely-filmed reminder of Nature’s epic scale. As if to underline the magic fickleness of this spectacle, these living clouds can descend for a moment before vanishing into the night as quickly as they came. It follows that Man has found a way to profit from this beautiful reproductive cycle. Harvesting grasshoppers in rural Uganda is a seriously lucrative business; fortunes are made in a matter of weeks providing this seasonal delicacy to hungry city-dwellers in the lowlands. Comprehensively filmed over the course of three seasons, Grasshopper Republic (which is also the locally-given name for the region) follows a local trapping team in strict verité style, as these modern-day prospectors push into remote forests and villages seeking their fortune by capturing this illusive prey by the barrel load. We witness massive generators being hauled up collapsing mudbanks. Light posts are erected with chemically treated bulbs, casting a lurid neon green pall over the tree canopy, irresistibly attracting the swarm to their corrugated iron traps. In deliberate contrast to this dystopian imposition, specialized macro cameras simultaneously transport the audience into an immersive natural world on a level with the perspective of the grasshoppers. A parade of frame-filling bugs heightens this magnified reality – accentuating the bizarrely human-like qualities of these insects while also highlighting the peril that lies behind every leaf. The risk to the human hunters is all-too real as well. As our metaphor on Man’s fraught relationship with Nature continues to unfold we learn the harrowing cost that these toxic lights bestow upon our band of trappers and their homeland. A scorched earth of skin disease and ruined crops reveals the downside of this gold rush.