DOCU/WORLD

Grasshopper Republic

Year
2023
Country
USA, Uganda
Duration
94’
Director
Daniel McCabe

Every rainy season, deep in the mountain forests of western Uganda, one of the world’s greatest natural phenomena takes place.

Millions, sometimes billions of long-horned grasshoppers swarm together to mate in a rarely-filmed reminder of nature’s epic scale. As if to underline the magic fickleness of this spectacle, these living clouds can descend for a moment before vanishing into the night as quickly as they came.

It follows that mankind has found a way to profit from this beautiful reproductive cycle. Harvesting grasshoppers in rural Uganda is a seriously lucrative business; fortunes are made in a matter of weeks by providing this seasonal delicacy to hungry city-dwellers in the lowlands.

Comprehensively filmed over the course of three seasons, Grasshopper Republic (which is also the locally-given name for the region) follows a local trapping team in strict verité style, as these modern-day prospectors push into remote forests and villages seeking their fortune by capturing this elusive prey by the barrelful. We witness massive generators being hauled up collapsing mudbanks. Light posts are erected with chemically treated bulbs, casting a lurid neon-green pall over the tree canopy, irresistibly attracting the swarm to their corrugated iron traps. In deliberate contrast to this dystopian imposition, specialised macro-cameras simultaneously transport the audience into an immersive natural world on a level with the perspective of the grasshoppers. A parade of frame-filling bugs heightens this magnified reality — accentuating the bizarrely human-like qualities of these insects while also highlighting the peril that lies behind every leaf.

The risk to the human hunters is all too real as well. As our metaphor on Man’s fraught relationship with Nature continues to unfold, we learn the harrowing cost that these toxic lights bestow upon our band of trappers and their homeland. A scorched earth of skin disease and ruined crops reveals the downside of this gold rush.

Grasshopper Republic explores this strange, beautiful, and dangerous predicament by examining the balance of survival between communities and ecosystems.

CREW:
Director: Daniel McCabe
Producer: Daniel McCabe, Alyse Ardell Spiegel, Michele Sibiloni, Otto Bell
Cinematographer: Daniel McCabe, Michele Sibiloni
Director
Daniel McCabe

Daniel McCabe is an American filmmaker and photographer currently based in New York. As a photo/video journalist McCabe has covered gang conflict in Honduras, Kenya’s 2008 post-election violence, the 2010 earthquake in Haiti and the ongoing conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (2008-2015). He has traveled extensively in Africa and his work has appeared in the National Geographic, the New York Times, Time magazine, the BBC, Al Jazeera and CNN among others. Daniel’s first feature-length documentary film, This Is Congo, tells the story of four lives lived amongst war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It premiered in 2017 at the 74th Venice International Film Festival, and has won numerous awards worldwide.

Selected Filmography
This Is Congo (2017)
Hall «KINOMAN»
Zhovten cinema
Kostiantynivska St, 26
Q&A
Original language with Ukrainian and English subtitles
By tickets
Adapted subtitles
Sunday
02 June 2024
17:40
Hall «ANSHLAG»
Zhovten cinema
Kostiantynivska St, 26
Original language with Ukrainian and English subtitles
By tickets
Adapted subtitles
Monday
03 June 2024
11:00
22 INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL
 6 — 13 
June 2025
Machtat
DOCU/WORLD
Machtat
Year
2023
Country
Lebanon
Director
Sonia Ben Slama
Duration
83’
DOCU/WORLD
A Golden Life
DOCU/WORLD
A Golden Life
Year
2023
Country
Burkina Faso, Benin, France
Director
Boubacar Sangaré
Duration
83’
DOCU/WORLD
Knit’s Island
DOCU/WORLD
Knit’s Island
Year
2023
Country
France
Directors
Ekiem Barbier, Guilhem Causse, Quentin L’helgoualc’h
Duration
95’
DOCU/WORLD
Rowdy Girl
DOCU/WORLD
Rowdy Girl
Year
2023
Country
USA
Director
Jason Goldman
Duration
72’
DOCU/WORLD
Body
DOCU/WORLD
Body
Year
2023
Country
Slovenia, Croatia, North Macedonia
Director
Petra Seliškar
Duration
91’
DOCU/WORLD
Magic Mountain
DOCU/WORLD
Magic Mountain
Year
2023
Country
Georgia, Poland
Directors
Mariam Chachia, Nik Voigt
Duration
74’
DOCU/WORLD
The World According to My Dad
DOCU/WORLD
The World According to My Dad
Year
2023
Country
Czech Republic, Slovakia
Director
Marta Kovářová
Duration
77’
DOCU/WORLD
Bigger Than Trauma
DOCU/WORLD
Bigger Than Trauma
Year
2022
Country
Croatia
Director
Vedrana Pribačić
Duration
90’
DOCU/WORLD