After so many years of travel and discovery I noticed that we often forget the daily journeys through many destinations, we forget most of the people and faces we met, but the real moments of discovery will remain & accompany us for the rest of our lives. In 2016 I made my first encounter with the African monkey « Barbary macaque » (Macaca sylvanus), known also in Morocco as «Zaatout».
I was not ready to forget this magnificent encounter, and then I realized that it was a privilege to meet a creature so intelligent and so close to humans. We traveled to the great Bouhachem Forest Reserve in northern Morocco, one of the few remaining refuges of the Barbary macaque (Chaouen and Tetouan Region), I was the fixer and the cameraman of the German DW television, working for an ecology program called «Global 3000».
Every day we woke up early to go back to the forest and start our observation of the daily life of this monkey who is in endangered animals, isolated and attacked (still have 4,000 Barbary macaques in this forest), and every day I discover that I am a homo sapien who spends a beautiful time with his relatives, it was funny & so deep experience. I have discovered that we have much to learn from the daily life of animals, to remain wise for hours to observe and film.
Since this shooting I started to have more interest for wildlife in Morocco, I filmed in the forests, islands, desert, mountain and sea, and I worked as a cameraman, producer and fixer. It was always a real pleasure to get out of city life often too stressful for me. That’s how I discovered the BBC Wild and all my friends from the city of Bristol in England. Today I am a fixer/local producer specialized in wildlife and I arrange shootings every year for specialized filming teams and also for scientists during their stay in Morocco. It’s a pleasure before it’s a job.
