Wild Salmon Center--Andy Maser, Co-Director + DP

Wild Salmon Center brought me on to make a film about the mythical Tugur River in the Russian Far East. The Tugur is one of the most remote and wild salmon rivers in the world, home to a species of trout called the taimen that, in this watershed, grows to 150 lbs. I called on my collaborator Adam Bagger and together we flew to Russia as a two-person team. This was in 2020. Today, because of political conditions, access would be impossible.

The only way into the Tugur is by Soviet-era helicopter from Khabarovsk courtesy of Alexander Abramov, a Russian oligarch and angler who purchased the entire river to protect it. His logic was straightforward: if you own the river, you control what happens to it. He'd hired mercenaries to deal with caviar poachers operating in the watershed. At the beautiful lodge he'd built along the river, we spent a week filming WSC's Guido Rahr and Russian scientist Mikhail Skopets fishing for taimen, collecting samples, and documenting a watershed that exemplifies the ideal salmon habitat. The days were long and cold--standing in the river in the rain, hours on open boats racing up and downstream in search of fish (still in the rain), swimming to get underwater shots. Every drop of discomfort was worth it.

The film, River Tigers: Giant Taimen of the Russian Far East, made the rounds of the festival circuit, now lives online, and footage from the Tugur later appeared in Running Wild: Return to the River, now in IMAX theaters worldwide.