The Serengeti Rules

Best of Fest to take viewers to the Serengeti, U.S.-Mexico Border and Denmark

By Heather Mongilio • January 24, 2019 • Frederick News Post

Zoologist Bob Paine wanted to know what would happen if he removed the top predator from an tide pool.

What he found was a collapse of the diversity in the environment, a theory he penned in a 1969 paper, prompting several years of research by Paine and other scientists to learn more about the importance of the top predator.

But by 2016, Paine had developed acute myeloid leukemia. He was sick, but he agreed to do an interview with filmmaker Nicolas Brown.

“And he was, very literally, on his deathbed,” Brown said.

But Paine gave an amazing interview, Brown said, and he chose to begin and end his film with it.

Brown’s film, “The Serengeti Rules,” follows ecologists and zoologists as they study Paine’s theory of the top predator encouraging diversity in a biosphere.

It is one of the three films that will play at Best of Fest on Feb. 1 at the Weinberg Theater in Frederick.

Best of Fest is an environmental film festival, showing three of the films that received awards from the American Conservation Film Festival. READ MORE»

DOWNLOAD PDF»