Review of Okavango: River of Dreams (2019)
Seen in 2020.
I saw it with Swedish-language narration on SVT, evidently not in the 2020 directors’ cut.
The seasons of the Okavango river delta in Botswana, and just how badly lions climb trees.
The quality of both the footage and the editing fluctuate quite a bit, indicating that some second-rate shots were added to pad the runtime, but the general standard is very high. The intro sequence, however, is bizarre. It’s not really a credits sequence, more of a music video, setting a Vasulka-style matt-melded supercut of the show to shock-rocker Marilyn Manson’s 1995 hit cover of the Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams”. It reappears in every episode and is utterly incongruous with Henrik Ekman’s dry narration. Perhaps it was a better fit for the original script and narrator.