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Image from The Last Bee film
Winner of the Best Fiction Film Award at the Festival Internacional de Cine Animal y Ambiental, The Last Bee imagines a future scenario where the planet's last populations of bees survive in a small region of Mexico.
The film, by British-Mexican director Osseily Hanna, was recognised at the prestigious festival of environmental film on 5 December in Mexico City.
Lars Chittka, Professor of Sensory and Behavioural Ecology at Queen Mary University of London, plays the eminent bee scientist Otto Schmidt, who devises an experiment to save the last population of bees on the planet from mass extinction and reinhabit the world with genetically engineered bees. He ignores warnings from a Mexican expert (Michelle Maldonado) that his planned interventions have substantial risks, with disastrous consequences.
Film director Osseily Hanna said:
"I began casting professional actors for the role of Dr Schmidt for my latest film The Last Bee, and soon realised that it would be an interesting twist to try to get an actual scientist to play the part. I contacted Lars Chittka and pitched him the idea to play a fictional role of an unhinged and uncompromising scientist. Luckily for me, he accepted my invitation to do a shoot last summer. I was surprised at how adept and adaptable he was to a role that is diametrically opposed to the real Lars Chittka."
A world-leading scientist on bee intelligence himself (having discovered that bees can count, recognise human faces, learn tool use by observation and might even have consciousness), Chittka's performance won him Best Actor at the Amsterdam New Film Festival earlier this year.
Chittka said:
"It was only my second role as an actor in a film and it was an interesting challenge to play a rather despicable character – a scientist with a colonial mindset whose arrogance and obsession ultimately results in the destruction of the very thing he wants to rescue. It was a huge honour to win the Best Actor Award and now for the whole film to be recognised in this manner at an international festival of environmental films.
As a scientist working frequently with Mexican colleagues, I am all too aware of the neocolonialist mindset of many European or North American scientists working in the global South. Director Hanna gave me a good deal of freedom to infuse the flawed character with a whole spectrum of psychopathic traits, and I profoundly enjoyed enacting the character's final destruction as the penalty for his arrogance."
Watch the trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxsApQQV9eM
