Weaver revisits Rwanda gorillas
2005-10-20 09:44
Washington - Oscar-nominated Sigourney Weaver hits television screens next year with the story of her first, emotional journey back to the mountains of Rwanda, 18 years on from the gut-wrenching movie Gorillas in the Mist.
Weaver visited the mountain apes featured in the bio-pic of crusading conservationist Dian Fossey, for Gorilla's Revisited, a BBC Natural History unit documentary for the United States-based Animal Planet channel.
"Gorillas Revisited is really a project from my heart," Weaver said in Washington, as she kicked off a year of events commemorating Fossey, a US naturalist murdered in her cabin in the Rwandan mountains in 1985, after years fighting to save gorillas from hunters.
"I had not gone back for 18 years, and during that time much had happened," Weaver said.
Since Weaver was last in Rwanda, the country has been wracked by civil war and the horror of a 1994 genocide, during which about 800 000 people, mostly minority Tutsis, were slain by Hutu extremists.
Weaver, honorary chair of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International, is headlining a fundraising drive for $30m to continue the work of the Fossey Fund, which runs large conservation projects in Rwanda and Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
The flagship programme is at Fossey's Karisoke Research Centre in Rwanda which works to safeguard mountain gorilla habitats and promotes anti-poaching patrols.
Weaver, star of Alien and Working Girl, scooped one of her three Academy Award nominations for Gorillas in the Mist.
Gorillas Revisited will be shown by Animal Planet on June 25 2006.