Mia and the White Lion

Mia moves with her family from London to South Africa, where her father starts running a lion farm. A white lion is born there and a bond forms between him and ten-year-old Mia. Then it emerges where the family's lions are being sold: to hunters who pay to shoot them in an enclosure. The most striking thing is how it was made. No digital effects were used; the lion is real, which is why it was shot over more than two and a half years, from May 2015 to December 2017. The reason is simple: the specialist Kevin Richardson had told the director that the only way a lion would not harm a child is if they grow up together, and that takes about three years. So the child and the lion on screen really did grow up together. Daniah De Villiers plays Mia. Gilles de Maistre directed. Watchable as a family, but not only an animal film: its second half takes direct aim at the canned hunting industry. Before you watch, know this: the script and the dialogue are weak and the family characters are thin. What carries the film is not the story but a relationship that was genuinely built on screen.