Mysterious Castles of Clay [SEP] director
Mysterious Castles of Clay
Mysterious Castles of Clay is a 1978 film about a termite colony; filmed in Kenya by film-makers Joan and Alan Root, and narrated by Orson Welles. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and received a Peabody Award.
Because the original film was lost, only three copies are known to exist in the United States. One of these is in the possession of famed nature documenter Ken Burns, another is in the possession of the science department of the Colorado Rocky
of Aubrey, and Chiels Margach, a Ugandan settler of Scottish origin, as cameramen. A tense score from John Dankworth emphasised the dramatic footage, the production having, in Willock's words, "the roar, dust and danger of the chase in every frame", including a sequence where the truck he occupied came under sustained attack from an angry rhino.
The Year of the Wildebeest (1974), Safari by Balloon (1975), Mysterious Castles of Clay (1978), Two in the Bush (1980