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Gorillas in the Mist is a 1988 film directed by Michael Apted, starring Sigourney Weaver as Dian Fossey, the American researcher who studied mountain gorillas in Rwanda’s Virunga volcanoes from 1967 until her murder in 1985. Based on Fossey’s 1983 book of the same name, it brought mountain gorillas and the poaching crisis to a huge international audience.
Weaver won a Golden Globe and was nominated for an Oscar for the role. The story is set in Rwanda, not Uganda, but it shaped how the world sees the gorillas you can visit in Bwindi and Mgahinga today.
What the film shows
The film follows Fossey from her early work, when the Kenyan palaeoanthropologist Louis Leakey sends her to study gorillas, through the founding of her research camp at Karisoke, her growing bond with the gorillas, especially the young silverback Digit, and her increasingly fierce campaign against poachers. It also portrays her relationship with the photographer Bob Campbell, played by Bryan Brown, and ends with her death. Much of it was filmed on location in Rwanda with wild gorillas, combined with scenes using performers in gorilla suits.
Fact and fiction
Like most film biographies, Gorillas in the Mist simplifies and dramatises. It compresses years of fieldwork into a few scenes, focuses on Fossey’s personal story and gives limited attention to the researchers, trackers and Rwandan staff who worked alongside her. Her harsh methods against suspected poachers are shown, but the wider debate about her opposition to tourism and community-based conservation is largely absent. For a fuller picture, see our guide to Dian Fossey and Karisoke.
The film’s legacy
Coming a decade after David Attenborough’s famous gorilla scene on television, the film reached a mass audience and raised awareness and support for the organisations protecting mountain gorillas. Ironically, given Fossey’s doubts about tourism, it also helped create demand to see gorillas in the wild, and carefully managed tourism became the main source of money for their protection. Read about Attenborough and the mountain gorillas.
The connection to Uganda
Fossey never worked in Bwindi, which has its own separate population of mountain gorillas, almost half of the world’s total. Uganda’s Mgahinga Gorilla National Park, however, lies in the same Virunga volcanoes where the film is set, and its gorillas share the same landscape. Gorilla tourism began in Uganda in 1993, when Bwindi’s Mubare family was opened to visitors, and the population has since grown to at least 1,063 mountain gorillas. See our guide to how tourism helped save mountain gorillas.
Watching it before your trip
Watching the film or reading the book is a good way to prepare for a gorilla trek, as long as you remember how much has changed. Today, visitors keep at least 7 m from the gorillas, groups are limited to eight people for one hour a day, and rangers and trackers, not lone researchers, protect the families. A Uganda permit costs US$800, or US$600 in April, May and November; see our guide to the Uganda gorilla permit.
Frequently asked questions
It is based on Dian Fossey’s life and book, though it simplifies and dramatises events.
Largely on location in Rwanda’s Virunga volcanoes, with real gorillas and some scenes using performers in suits.
Sigourney Weaver, who won a Golden Globe and was nominated for an Oscar.
No. She worked in Rwanda after starting in Congo.
