• Feature Documentary
  • 90 mins
  • 2010

The Blood of The Rose

The extraordinary life and brutal death of filmmaker-turned-conservationist Joan Root and her campaign to save her beloved Lake Naivasha in Kenya. Who killed Joan Root? Was it the fish poachers, whom Root stopped from plying their illegal trade in a bid to save the lake? Was it her once-loyal staff member Chege, whom Root ultimately cut off from her payroll? Or was it someone closer to home?

Through telling the story, the film opens a window onto the simmering tensions in an Africa still emerging from colonialism and anxious to take its place in the global economy. For it is the Kenyan rose, which is exported by the millions from Naivasha to Europe and the rest of the world that has brought – not just jobs and foreign exchange earnings – but the environmental destruction that Root worked so hard to stop and which may have ultimately cost her her life.


Director
Henry Singer

Producer
Henry Singer

Editor
Ben Stark

Broadcaster
BBC (UK), WDR (Germany), NRK (Japan)
Henry Singer's extraordinary film which, like his 2006 film 'The Falling Man', takes an apparently isolated incident and works backwards to embrace wider and equally troubling questions…. Part whodunit, part character study, and part environmental tract, its whole is utterly gripping.

Time Out

The brilliance of this sensationally good documentary from Henry Singer, the acclaimed filmmaker of 'The Falling Man’, is how viewers are treated with the intelligence to be presented with different versions and left to decide for themselves.

The Mail on Sunday

It is rare to review a perfect film…This beautifully shot film contained anything you could want from a narrative in fact or fiction...

The Times

Nothing is as it seems in this brilliant film, from the maker of ‘The Falling Man’, which tells how eco activist Joan Root was murdered in her lakeside home in Kenya. It’s a gripping and unforgettable watch that matches any fictional thriller.

Daily Mail