Elephant Rescue Documentary Love & Bananas to Screen At Firehouse

The Newburyport Documentary Film Festival in partnership with the Firehouse Center for the Arts announced its next screening of their quarterly Film Series with the highly-acclaimed film Love & Bananas on Saturday, July 28.  Elephant rescues in Thailand are rare, unpredictable and often life threatening. After preparing for more than 2.5 years, actor/director Ashley Bell and a team of elephant rescuers led by world renowned Asian elephant conservationist and TIME Magazine's Hero of Asia, Lek Chailert, chronicle a daring mission 480 miles across Thailand to rescue Noi Na, a 70-year old partially blind trekking elephant and bring her to freedom. African elephants are slaughtered for their ivory, but sadly the plight of the Asian Elephant has been completely overlooked even though they are the elephant we are most familiar with in zoos, circuses and elephant rides. Love & Bananas exposes the cruel secret that every Asian elephant has had to endure to become a service animal; a process known as Pajan, aka The Crush Box. Love & Bananas aims to ignite a new way of thinking about this species and shows what can be done to prevent the extinction of Asian elephants.
 
The NY Times Review calls this film “…an informative, emotionally charged documentary about animal cruelty and the people who are trying to stop it.”   An official selection for the 2018 Wildlife International Film Festival, Forbes recently described this film as having “…the potential to be life-changing – for viewers and, in turn, for the endangered Asian elephants who are the subjects of this powerful movie.”

The evening will start at 6:00pm with a free wine, beer and cheese reception followed by the film at 7:00pm and a panel discussion afterward.
 
$20.  Purchase tickets in advance here  TICKETS  or at the Firehouse box office.