The film
The Great Green Wall is an African-led project to grow an 8,000km line of trees and plants across the continent. Growing a World Wonder follows Binta, an eight-year-old girl in Senegal, as she and her family tend their section of the Wall.
It is a venturethree film, made with the UNCCD and developed with Apache, Al Maxwell and Surround Vision. Richard Nockles directed it, on a two-week shoot in Koyli Alpha, a village of the Fulani people.
What we did
The film’s makers set out to show the scale of the Wall from the air, and shot all of its aerial footage from a specially adapted drone. We flew it: Ben Huss (credited as Ben Huss-Smickler) and Sununu Hernandez were the drone operators.
How it was shown
It premiered to world leaders at the COP21 climate change conference in Paris in December 2015, and was released in 360 on YouTube and as an iOS and Android app for Samsung Gear VR and Google Cardboard. The film had more than 188,000 views on YouTube by 30 September 2026.
In 2016 it won Best Documentary at the Screen4All 360 Film Festival in Paris. It has also been shown at La Géode in Paris and at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and footage from it was shown at the opening ceremony of the Rio Olympics.
Credits
- Created by
- venturethree, with the UNCCD
- Developed with
- Apache, Al Maxwell and Surround Vision
- Director
- Richard Nockles
- Producer
- Mitch Turnbull
- Director of photography
- Ignacio Ferrando Margeli
- Drone operators
- Ben Huss-Smickler and Sununu Hernandez
- Binta
- Binta Ka