The Blaze

Africa, 140,000 years ago. After 100,000 years of relentless drought the human race is brought to its knees, with only a few tribes holding out across the continent, most of whom live in the volatile great Rift Valley. Then a volcano erupts over vast tracts of the valley, raining down ash far beyond and even hiding the sun from view. The human race is almost wiped out. A few survive and became the ancestors to us all. The Blaze plots the desperate yet inspiring journey of the few who banded together and used wits, teamwork and belief to allow our story to keep being told.

Director’s statement
I’ve watched so many far-fetched Hollywood disaster movies about disasters that threaten humanity; so many post-apocalyptic far-fetched films and TV series where tiny populations hang on in the shadows of some monster that now dominates the world, and yet something very similar actually happened to us, the ultimate human apocalypse, where we were a hair’s breadth from being wiped out, and homo sapiens were very nearly nothing but a few footprints in the volcanic sand, without even an antelope ever being scratched onto a single rock. I want to tell this story. I’ve been working with academics from the Universities of Liverpool, Cambridge, Sydney, Wroclaw and the National Museums of Kenya and Australia to construct the epic story of how we survived an apocalypse.