Jed Riffe Films

Pleistocene Park

“Bravo! Wow, I love this film! It has folly, it has beauty, defeat, perseverance, despair, and success – like life.”

Kevin White, Executive Director, Filmmakers Collaborative SF

    Seeking no one’s help and asking nobody’s permission, in the most remote corner of Siberia, Russian scientist Sergey Zimov and his son Nikita are resurrecting a vanished Ice Age ecosystem. They are scouring the planet for holdovers from the Ice Age and transporting them, by whatever low-budget means they can contrive, to Pleistocene Park.

    Twenty years ago Sergey rocked the scientific community by publishing a paradigm-shattering discovery in Science Magazine. Frozen Arctic soils contain twice as much carbon as the Earth’s atmosphere. These soils are starting to melt. This could make climate change virtually unstoppable.

“Wow, what a ride!”

Ken Schneider, Director, Los Hermanos

    While other scientists rushed to the Arctic to conduct follow-up research that would untangle the implications of Zimov’s discovery, Sergey went a step further. He proposed that millions of horses, bison, reindeer, yaks, muskoxen, camels — and perhaps cloned wooly mammoths — once again roaming the northern half of Asia, can stabilize permafrost and prevent this catastrophic scenario of runaway global warming. And then, to prove his theory, he started bringing the animals. He called his experiment Pleistocene Park.

    While Zimov’s brilliance and charisma have won him friends and supporters, his oversized ego, lack of diplomacy, and cranky iconoclasm make him a challenge to work with. Pleistocene Park itself remains an extremely funky operation, dominated by mud pits and swarming mosquitoes, rather than vast thundering herds.

    Over time Sergey becomes increasingly irritable and cynical, predicting the collapse of civilization to anybody who will listen. Nikita, Sergey’s son, is the last man standing to deal with his father’s idiosyncrasies and carry the burden of his epic vision. With the world watching, the only way out is forward. He recruits an American filmmaker who has been following him around for years, but shows no sign of producing a finished documentary, to help with a crowdfunding campaign. Participant observation is a slippery slope and the filmmaker finds himself pulled in way over his head.

“Pleistocene Park is simply wonderful. A humorous documentary is a rare thing. Sergey is unusual, sympathetic, intelligent, cantankerous character. And Nikita saves the day. Luke has told this story through emotion, it’s impressive. The world is ready for a positive environmental story.”

Nancy Kelly, Filmmaker

    The clock is ticking. Impacts of climate change – hurricanes, wildfires, heat waves and floods – are being felt sooner than anticipated. Sergey and Nikita find alarming evidence that permafrost is reaching its tipping point now, rather than in thirty years in the future as they predicted. On a global scale, progress addressing the root cause of climate change, anthropogenic carbon emissions, is as elusive as ever.

    Can two Russians stave off a worst-case scenario of global environmental catastrophe and reshape humanity’s relationship with the natural world?
 

News about the film:

• Vice acquires “Pleistocene Park” from Java Films

More info about the Park itself:

Official website: https://pleistocenepark.ru. If you want to support the work Sergey and Nikita Zimov are doing at Pleistocene Park you will find several options on their website including a US-based nonprofit, a European-based nonprofit, and a Patreon.
 

Media coverage of the Park:

• Science
• National Geographic
• The Atlantic
• The Economist
• 60 Minutes
• Google “Pleistocene Park” and you will find much more

Release date: 2022 Director: Luke Griswold-Tergis Producer: Jed Riffe Editor: Maureen Gosling

Best Film Another Way Film Festival 2022 (Spain) Innsbruck Nature Film Festival 2022 (Austria) Audience Award Vera Film Festival 2022 (Finland) Green Film Festival of San Francisco 2022 (California) Special Mention Cinemambiente 2022 (Italy) Olomouc International Festival of Science Documentary Films 2022 (Czech Republic)