Deep in the heart of the Congo, roving troops of gorillas have been known to raid crops, ripping out whole vegetable gardens by the root. For Africans who own the farms, the majestic lowland gorilla isn’t an endangered animal to be preserved at all costs — it’s a threat. And more often than not, protecting their livelihood is more important than protecting the gorillas.

Nobody’s in a better position to preserve and protect endangered African wildlife than Africans. Still, wildlife conservation films have traditionally been made by and for Westerners.

”We were making films for the wrong audience,” says Cynthia Moses, conservationist and veteran filmmaker. “We were making films for people who had never been in Africa, people in the United States and Europe. We needed to educate the local audience and it seemed that it might be a good idea to have them participate. It just makes sense to have Africans make films about their environment because they’re the people on the ground who can handle the day-to-day conservation.”

Moses and fellow filmmaker David Weiner struck into the heart of Africa with a PowerBook, an iBook and four borrowed mini-DV cameras. Their goal: Teach the locals how to film and edit their own videos about wildlife conservation using Final Cut Pro, iMovie and Apple computers.

“It just makes sense to have Africans make films about their environment because they’re the people on the ground who can handle the day-to-day conservation.”

Africa Bound

”I remember one day we were stuck in the rain and we couldn’t move camp,” says Moses. It was her first expedition into the African jungle, a six-week, 250-mile trek through the Ndoki forest with writer Tim Cahill and 13 Pygmies. They were tracking scientist and explorer Mike Fay through the forest for a National Geographic documentary. “I remember being there, in the in the rain, soaking wet — raincoats don’t do much in African rain — and I said to myself, ‘This is exactly where I want to be.’ I decided then and there that I was going to make it my business to be in the rain forest as much as possible. And then I asked myself, ‘Why did it take me so long to get here?’”

Moses’s journey began nearly 30 years earlier in a Springfield, Massachuesetts, classroom. The recent college grad was teaching junior high school English when she had the sudden urge to embark on an adventure. “I’d always wanted to go to Africa,” she says. “I knew that if I didn’t get out soon, I’d never leave Springfield. So I joined the Peace Corps and headed to Africa.” Moses fell in love with the continent during a two-year tour in the Ivory Coast. She returned to the U.S., but teaching English had lost its appeal. Moses decided to explore a new career path. She studied media and television at Columbia University in New York, where she discovered a passion for documentary filmmaking.

That passion didn’t cut a swath straight back to the jungles of Central Africa. Instead, it put Moses on another long and twisted track. She became an intern at a PBS station in New York, then a producer at a satellite news station. During it all, she managed to earn her second master’s degree in journalism from Stanford. She eventually landed a job as an assignment editor on the news desk at ABC in London, where she handled news coverage in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. That led to a production job with “60 Minutes,” which in turn opened the gates to the Shangri-la of documentary filmmaking, National Geographic, where she became an associate producer. Moses was going back to Africa.

The Right Audience

While screening one of her films in a town in the northern Congo, Moses was approached by an elderly man. He was amazed by the footage her crew had shot of lowland gorillas in the nearby forest. “’Is that America?’ he asked me,” says Moses. “‘No,’ I replied, ‘it’s your country.’ He had never seen that many gorillas in one place before. We all think that since Africans live near the forest, they know the animals, but they haven’t seen the kind of behavior that we see in American and European films. That’s when I knew we had the wrong audience. Local populations who live near the jungle have the greatest potential to save endangered animals, yet they’ve never seen most of the animals that share their habitat.”

Next Page: A Style of Their Own