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ASILIA AFRICA | Honest Film Company Deck
Honest Film Co. is a documentary-focused production company built around real stories.
We make cinematic films that feel grounded and intentional, often working in remote landscapes, conservation spaces, and community environments where authenticity cannot be faked.
❋ Strong Visuals❋ Genuine Emotions❋ Real ConversationsEverything we create is driven by one idea
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Is it HONEST?
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Everything we create is driven by one idea 〰️ Is it HONEST? 〰️
Our Team
Zander Botha
Director and CinematographerZander has spent the past six years directing and shooting documentary films across Africa. His work focuses on conservation, community stories, and organisations doing meaningful work on the ground.
Liam Nesbitt
Cinematographer and EditorLiam works across production and field filming. He brings a strong instinct for story and a practical approach to getting the job done in challenging environments.
OUR FOCUS
Our work focuses on stories rooted in people and place. We are interested in organisations doing meaningful work in the real world, where impact is visible in the lives of the communities involved.
The work Asilia Africa is doing across East Africa sits at the edge of a genuine tension, between wildlife and the people who share land with it, between conservation ambition and the daily economic pressures of rural life. Lion Defenders tracking predators at dawn. Farmers running crop protection drills before harvest. These are not abstract impact stories. They are specific, human, and unresolved.
That is exactly the kind of story we are drawn to tell.
Conservation, wildlife and environmental work
NGOs and social impact organisations
Communities and human stories
Brands doing meaningful work in the world
PROOF OF CONCEPT
‘Silence to be Broken’
A documentary film following the rollout of the Take 5 mental health programme.
The film centres on the people behind the work. By spending time with the Waves for Change team, the champions being trained, the coaches delivering the programme, and the children taking part, the story unfolds through their experiences.
Filmed in the suburbs of Cape Town, the film builds a strong emotional connection to the characters carrying the work forward on the ground. Through these personal stories, the audience comes to understand the impact of Take 5 locally, and the potential it holds for young people around the world.
‘Primeras & Segundas’
A short documentary film exploring the proposed Marine Protected Area in the Primeiras and Segundas Archipelago.
The film centres on the people living and working along this coastline. By spending time with local fishing communities, conservation practitioners, and those involved in shaping the MPA, the story unfolds through their lived experiences of a system in transition.
Filmed in northern Mozambique, the film builds a grounded and emotional connection to a place under pressure. Through these personal perspectives, the audience begins to understand the tension between dependence on the ocean and the need to protect it, as well as the realities of introducing conservation in a space where livelihoods are directly affected.
FILM IDEAS FOR ASILIA AFRICA
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In the communal lands bordering Ruaha National Park, the boundary between wildlife and livelihood is not a fence. It is a gap in the thorn.
For generations, losing livestock to a predator meant one thing: retaliation. A lion killed meant a family protected, a herd secured, a threat removed. That calculus is slowly changing.
We follow a Lion Defender on his morning patrol, a young man from a pastoralist community who, not long ago, might have gained status by hunting the animals he now tracks to protect. He moves through the miombo at first light, reading the ground for signs of where a pride passed in the night, and who might be in their path.
Alongside him, we see a livestock owner repairing a boma, a family weighing what last night's loss means for the month ahead, and a community beginning to measure the value of a living lion differently.
This is not a story about saving wildlife.
It is a story about what it costs to change your relationship with the thing that threatens you, and what becomes possible when that shift takes hold.
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By late afternoon in southern Tanzania, the sorghum is almost ready. So are the elephants.
For farming families on the edge of wildlife corridors, the weeks before harvest are the most exposed of the year. A single night raid can erase months of work. The threat is not distant or occasional. It is patterned, predictable, and personal.
We follow a crop protection team through the final stretch of the growing season, farmers who have been trained to monitor, deter, and respond rather than simply absorb the loss. We see the tools they carry, the routines they run after dark, and the decisions they make in real time when a herd moves close to the field boundary.
Behind the practical work is a larger question about who bears the cost of conservation, and what changes when communities are given real agency over the answer.
This is not a story about elephants threatening farms.
It is a story about what it looks like when rural communities stop being the collateral damage of wildlife and start being its custodians.
Next Steps
ASILIA AFRICA REVIEWS STUDIO DECK
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TEAM INITIAL
INTRO DISCUSSION
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CHARACTER RESEARCH
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CONFIRMATION OF
INTEREST
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PROJECT PROPOSAL
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TEAM ON GROUND IN
TANZANIA / RUAHA
(APRIL)
If our work resonates, we would be excited to explore how we could collaborate.