Austria 2024 – 52 min – Director: Johnson Prum & Doug Schultz

A renaturalised coastal strip on the Pacific coast is enabling long-disappeared predatory cats to return to their old hunting grounds. At first, it seems like a setback for nature conservation that jaguars find the endangered olive ridley sea turtles easy prey when they come to the beach to spawn. But the film ‘Paradise of the Jaguars’ by Johnson Prum and Doug Schultz shows that ecology is more complex than that. It lets the audience discover that the jaguars indirectly help the turtles because they keep the many small predators away from the beach and thus prevent them from eating thousands of turtle eggs. The use of automatic cameras, known as photo traps, provides intimate insights into the jaguars' behaviour. And it is only in moving images that they provide evidence of previously unknown, astonishing ecological relationships.