Kick off the festival in style with the WildWalk parade! Join us at this fun and free community event, where children and families dress like their favorite wild animals to dance,crawl, swing and slither through downtown Missoula as our wildlife parade roars down Higgins Avenue. Parade Lineup begins at 11:30 a.m. at the Red X’s (600 Railroad St. W). The parade ends in Caras Park for WildFest, a community celebration (12:00-3:00pm). Stay in costume and enjoy live entertainment, face painting and concessions with your fellow wild animal revelers – plus a fun fun fun FREE concert by The WhizPops!
Showing Today
3:00 pm: Prehistoric Planet & Life Force: Borneo
3:15 pm: A Sloth Named Velcro, Sophisticated Ants, & Potty Time
5:00 pm: Manufactured Landscapes
5:15 pm: Invasion of the Killer Whales & Leopard: Ultimate Survivor
7:00 pm: Cave of Forgotten Dreams
7:15 pm: A Wolf’s Place & Snow Monkeys
Cave of Forgotten Dreams
In this documentary, filmmaker Werner Herzog and a small crew are given a rare chance to film inside France’s Chauvet Cave, where the walls are covered with the world’s oldest surviving paintings. To preserve the art, people are allowed to enter the site for only two weeks a year. Examining the 30,000-year-old drawings, Herzog discusses how the artwork represents humanity’s earliest dreams with scientists and art scholars conducting research at Chauvet.
Invasion of the Killer Whales
As the ice shrinks, the polar bear is struggling to survive in a fast melting world. Although a marine mammal, the polar bear is not adapted to hunting in the water. And they are certainly no match for the world’s greatest aquatic hunter – the killer whale. In the last few years scientists have started noting an ever-growing number of killer whales in Arctic waters in the summer months. More and more have been attracted to these huge hunting grounds by the growing expanses of open water. And they are attacking exactly the same prey animals as the polar bears.
Leopard: Ultimate Survivor
A filmmaker’s chance encounter leads to a rare opportunity to follow a mother and her cubs through the first precarious years of life in the wilds of Botswana, where competition is tough and predators are fierce.
Life Force II: Borneo
The tropical island of Borneo: a strange and mysterious place of mutant creatures and plants seen nowhere else on Earth. Pygmy forest mammals, weird co-evolved partnerships between plants and animals, the world’s rarest ape and incredible gliders, occupy these 130 million year old jungles.
Manufactured Landscapes
This documentary reveals the gritty underside of industrial landscapes. Photographer Edward Burtynsky explores the subtle beauty amid the waste generated by slag heaps, dumps and factories. Memorable scenes include a Chinese iron factory where employees are berated to produce faster, and shots of children playing atop piles of dangerous debris. The contrasts between wealth and poverty are most striking in Shanghai, with new high-rises towering above old slums.
Potty Time
One sloth’s epic journey to go to the bathroom.
Snow Monkeys
In the frigid valleys of Japan’s Shiga Highlands, a troop of snow monkeys make their way and raise their families in a complex society of rank and privilege where each knows their place. Their leader is still new to the job and something of a solitary grouch. But one little monkey, innocently unaware of his own lowly social rank, reaches out to this lonely leader, forming a bond with him that manages over time to warm his less than sunny disposition. It is a rare and remarkable gesture that alters both their lives. Changing seasons bring new babies to care for, a profusion of insects and blossoms to eat, family disagreements to squabble over and tragedies to overcome. Mating season brings competition for females as the days grow shorter and colder in a rush toward winter. But with their now confident leader to guide them and their families to shelter and care for them, this troop of snow monkeys is ready to face the world.
Walking with Dinosaurs: Prehistoric Planet
Walking with Dinosaurs: Prehistoric Planet 3D is the most ambitious giant screen 3D film ever to feature photo-real dinosaurs set in real live action landscapes, immersing audiences in an amazing prehistoric age. It is an epic natural history film that shows the life and world of these amazing animals as though we have taken our cameras back 70 million years.
A Sloth Named Velcro
In 2000, Ana Salceda, a young journalist, moved from her native Spain to explore the wilds of Panama where she became the caregiver for a tiny orphaned baby sloth named Velcro. For two years, the two became inseparable as Ana learned how to become a successful adoptive mother to Velcro, until finally the day came for Ana to reintroduce Velcro back to the wild. This is the story of Ana’s return to Central and South Americas to see how much has changed since Velcro came into her life. Sloths, once largely ignored, have become a hot topic of scientific researchers.
A Wolf’s Place
Twenty years after their reintroduction, wild wolves have made a remarkable comeback in the Rocky Mountains. But as new hunting seasons take heavy tolls and politicians push to remove all protections across the US, gray wolves stand on the edge of a precipice. ‘A Wolf’s Place’ examines how wolves impact entire ecosystems in what scientists call a “trophic cascade.” It also explores the personal side of large carnivore conservation through the story of Wolf 10, the first wild wolf released into Yellowstone in over 70 years – his triumphant life and tragic death in the sights of a poacher’s gun.
Wildlife – Sophisticated Farmers: Leafcutter Ants
The leafcutter ant, living in the tropical forests of Central America, has been part and parcel of this jungle terrain, cultivating the land and creating a labyrinth of underground farms for over 50 million years. These tiny creatures live in one of the most complex societies known in the animal kingdom, and they play a crucial role in the wellbeing of the forest.