Primate Cinema: Baboons as Friends

Primate Cinema is a series of video experiments that translate primate social dramas for human audiences. The first experiment, Baboons as Friends, is a two channel video installation juxtaposing field footage of baboons with a reenactment by human actors, shot in film noir style. A tale of lust, jealousy, sex, and violence transpires simultaneously in human and nonhuman worlds. Beastly males, instinctively attracted to a femme fatale, fight to win her, but most are doomed to fail. The story of sexual selection is presented across species, the dark genre of film noir re-mapping the savannah to the urban jungle. 

Created in collaboration with cognitive scientist, Deborah Forster, who shot the field footage of olive baboons in Kenya.

Played by Camillia Sanes, Patrick Mulderrig, Randy Tobin, Shaun Madden, and Andrew Maxwell.