WE, APES

Director / Producer

Alesi

Born in Arizona to a Mexican father and an American mother, Alesi spent her childhood years exploring the flora and fauna of the Sonoran Desert: collecting prickly pear fruit, searching for javelina, and checking her boots for scorpions. Her early fascination with the natural world was planted then and has blossomed since.

Alesi’s library is lined with books about primates. Reading was not enough for Alesi, for words are not enough to capture this riveting subject. It must be experienced. Alesi volunteered at a baboon rehabilitation center in South Africa, where she came away humbled with a few scars.

It’s in moments of near death that one’s life purpose is revealed.

Since then, Alesi has tracked and filmed wild chimpanzees in Uganda. She has been charged by a silverback gorilla in Rwanda. She has built connections with the vast majority of the community of primate researchers, including Jane Goodall and Frans de Waal.

Now, Alesi is producing We, Apes, a film that promises to thoroughly provoke our sense of who we are in the animal kingdom.