Gordon Buchanan swaps his usual behind-the-lens post for a seat in the dirt alongside communities who treat apex predators as neighbours. Across six hour-long films he learns to read the Kalahari with San trackers who recognise individual lions by whisker spots, crouches in an Ecuadorian canoe while Waorani hunters wrestle 5-metre anacondas for supper, and crouches on a Mongolian crag as a Kazakh teenager launches a 6-kg golden eagle at a fox.
The camera never flinches: a New Guinea crocodile is dispatched with a bamboo spear, Solomon Islanders stroke reef sharks into a trance, and in Harar, Ethiopia, hyenas trot into town after dark to take meat from elders’ mouths. Buchanan’s quiet questions probe how coexistence works rather than why it shouldn’t, letting each culture set the terms of contact.
The BBC’s customary orchestral score is stripped back to cicadas, footfall and breath, so when a lioness brushes past the sound team you hear only dry grass and the cameraman swallowing. Two seasons were shot between 2016 and 2017, totalling twelve episodes that map a living manual on staying alive alongside things that can kill you. The series aired on BBC Two and remains a go-to classroom resource for geography departments who need proof that humans can still hold their own in the food chain without eradicating everything else.
Production Details
2016
Main Cast
