Brad Bestelink on ‘Living with Leopards’ and Wildlife Filmmaking

Brad Bestelink is a renowned wildlife documentary filmmaker whose work captures Africa’s wilderness in breathtaking detail. From National Geographic specials to Netflix originals, his films have captivated global audiences and deepened appreciation for wildlife conservation.

His latest documentary, Living with Leopards (Netflix), offers an extraordinary, up-close look at a leopard family in Botswana’s Okavango Delta. Blending cinematic visuals with deeply personal storytelling, the film redefines traditional nature documentaries through an emotional, character-driven lens.

Maryam Tahmasebi from The Game Magazine sat down with Bestelink to discuss the inspiration behind the film, the challenges of living among predators, and the power of emotional storytelling in driving conservation.

“We’ve got all the tools, gimbals, drones, high-end cameras, but I tell my crew, especially the younger ones, that these are just tools. Some of them get excited and say, ‘This camera is great, this lens is amazing,’ and I say, ‘Sure, but can you tell a story?’” – Brad Bestelink.

Note: This conversation includes descriptions of wildlife predation and death, as well as discussions of risk and danger.

Living Among Leopards: A Conversation with Brad Bestelink, Director and Wildlife Filmmaker

By Maryam Tahmasebi

You can find wildlife documentaries all over the place, but Living with Leopards, released on Netflix in 2024, feels different. It’s personal, emotional, and beautifully filmed. The story unfolds like a family drama but with leopards. Each animal has its own personality, its own rhythm, and you get drawn into their world in a way that feels almost cinematic. The film was nominated for Best Natural History Documentary at the 2024 Grierson Awards, and its hauntingly beautiful music earned a nomination at the Wildscreen Film Festival.

At the heart of it all is Brad Bestelink. A filmmaker who’s lived his entire life in the wild. Brad was born and raised in Botswana’s Okavango Delta in southern Africa, and spent his early years in a remote bush camp built by his parents. That life shaped him. He’s been following predators—especially leopards—for decades, not from a distance, but by living alongside them, watching their stories day after day.

Brad has filmed over 45 hours of wildlife documentaries, including Savage Kingdom, The Flood, Hostile Planet, and Africa’s Deadliest, many in partnership with National Geographic and the BBC. He’s also the founder of the Natural History Film Unit and has received multiple Emmy nominations, along with awards for Best Natural History Film and Best Documentary Feature.

In this interview, we talk about leopards, the filming, the waiting, the risks, and the particular, quiet magic of living in the wild.

Before we talk about your films, I want to take a step back. What made you decide not just to document wildlife, but to actually live among them?

It’s a long story in the sense that I’m a product of very adventurous people. I’m very, very lucky. My grandfather was a real pioneer in wildlife. In those days, he was a hunter; unfortunately, he used to hunt crocodiles, and he was given the Okavango as a concession to hunt crocodiles. Then he was killed by a black mamba, a snake.
And my mother and father didn’t believe in killing animals in the wild. So, they took over one of his old hunting camps, and in 1968, they built the first photographic tourism lodge in the Okavango.

In those days, nobody went to the bush unless they could hunt. They just said, “Look, we can’t believe people are still killing things.” So they started the first photographic tourism safaris in the Okavango. It wasn’t even a concept then. There weren’t many people, and they lived this sort of remote life—Robinson Crusoe-style—growing vegetables and with big gaps between tourists because it wasn’t really an industry in those days. They just loved living out in the wild.
I was born in 1977. Within four days of being born, I was taken into the bush where they lived, at the camp. I didn’t leave there for the first four years of my life. So, I grew up in the Okavango, among wildlife.

And I think with that and having a photographic mindset instead of a hunting mindset, slowly, over the years, I started doing guiding. I was one of the youngest people in Botswana to get a guide’s license at 16. I just wanted to spend more and more time in the wild with animals.
In tourism, people come in for a few days. They get to see this, they get to see that, and then they leave. So, how could I spend more time in the field and with animals? I started photographing. I started painting. And then, I saw the opportunity to work with some filmmakers, as an assistant and researcher. That gave me a reason to be in the field with animals and to invest that kind of time with them.

Literally, the same year I left high school, I went back into the bush and started working with filmmakers in residence for National Geographic. It was meant to be three months, and I worked with them for thirteen years. And that was me. It’s my home. It’s where I’m most comfortable. It’s what I understand most. It’s in my blood, and I just wanted to spend more time with animals—especially predators—really getting to understand them.
It’s been a lifestyle choice that was made for me from infancy. It was just very lucky that I got the opportunity to go into something I was passionate about and totally comfortable with. It’s never been anything different for me.

Speaking of this lifestyle, what in your opinion, is the importance of documenting wildlife?

My biggest thing is that it’s about conservation and getting people to fall in love with the characters. Our style of making documentaries is very much that. My feeling is that if you don’t engage with your subjects on an emotional level, then you don’t care for them.

So for me, it’s very much about finding individuals and telling biographical stories, and getting people to really understand and fall in love with the character itself. If you can reach them on an emotional level—and Living with Leopards is a good example—you connected with those characters, you sort of fell in love with them, and really understood them because it’s a very personal involvement.

I think in all documentaries, if you can make people fall in love with the subjects and with their characters, then it starts to resonate. People start to care. And people don’t care about things that don’t emotionally engage them.
For me, if you can get people emotionally engaged, then they start thinking about conservation, start thinking about protection. The conservation side of it then has a real hook into it. People are not going to want to protect and conserve wild areas if they’re not emotionally invested in the animals that are part of it.

Isn’t it dangerous to live so closely with predators like leopards?

That’s one of the walls we try to break down. A lot of people ask me about the danger of what we do, but the truth is: the context matters.
It’s all about understanding. The animals aren’t just trying to eat you or kill you. They have very complex societies, complex ways of working. They don’t want to take risks that could get them injured because if they get injured, they die.

There’s a lot of natural respect out here. Of course, they’re predators and they kill certain things, but they kill things they know they can, things that won’t cause a massive risk to themselves.

I’ve spent 30,000 to 40,000 hours with leopards, lions, and other predators, and sometimes even more. And throughout that time, I’ve had maybe three or four moments in my life where I felt I could have died. And most of those times, it was my fault, and it was me not respecting boundaries.

Actually, it’s very forgiving, and there’s a real respect in this environment. If you understand that, then it’s safer here. Leopards come underneath the room I’m sitting in, and it’s not a threat to us.

We live among them, and we actually encourage the animals in our camp. We’ve had far less threat here than I would have in Johannesburg or any big city.
It’s just a misconception. The stories we tell try to break those barriers and get people to understand, fall in love with the animals, and move past that fear of the unknown. Because that’s what it is: fear of the unknown. Once people understand, the fear starts to go away.

“You can only tell powerful stories if you’re truly involved in them. If it’s real for you, it will be real for others.” – Brad Bestelink.

In Living with Leopards, you said you had to become a leopard—to think like one, move like one. That sentence stayed with me. How do you train yourself to reach that level of understanding?

It’s about observation. Anyone who’s really interested in the natural world is very curious, and it’s about picking up behavior. You try to understand what their needs are, how they move, and how they hunt.

If you’re following a leopard while she’s hunting, you can’t just barrel along behind her with a noisy vehicle. You have to stop. You have to give her space to listen. If she’s listening, you stop. If there’s prey around, she has to be able to hear them. You don’t want to ruin the hunt or accidentally push her into danger.

So you begin to pick up the rhythm: how they move, what their intention is, what they’re doing. Most people don’t realize that animals are very habitual. They follow patterns.
For example, if leopards are moving through a forest, they’ll use one or two of the same paths every time. They won’t just take a random new route. So if we leave her at a certain point heading north on an island, the next day we check the links between that island and another because we know she’ll use one of those specific paths.

If they’re being territorial, they’ll move quickly and cover ground. If they’ve got cubs, they’re more sedentary and stay closer to den sites. You start to understand their context; when they’ve eaten, when they haven’t, when they’re hunting.

When a leopard hasn’t killed in five days and she’s got cubs, she’s hunting. You can see it in her entire behavior. And you have to adjust your own behavior accordingly.
Every leopard is different. People ask me when I’m going to make another leopard film, and Living with Leopards was already my fourth single-species film on them. But I say I could make leopard films forever. Every individual is different. They’ve got unique personalities and habits that vary by terrain, prey, and habitat.

When you truly understand one, you start to move like them. You sync with their rhythm. You don’t just become a leopard, you become that leopard. And I do.
And when you’ve spent years with one—like in Living with Leopards, where we spent three years with Mochima—you start dreaming about her at night. You know her so well that you begin to anticipate her thoughts. That’s how deep it gets.

What’s the hardest part about capturing leopards on camera? Have there been times when you spent days or weeks chasing a moment that never came?

It does happen. For example, that moment when Mochima jumped from a tree and killed an impala—it’s something that happens seasonally. We saw moments of it one year, but we missed a lot of them. Then the season changed, and we didn’t get it again.

So the next season, we were ready. We spent months working toward capturing that one particular piece of behavior and we worked non-stop through it, waiting for that moment. And, of course, when you start seeing signs—when she starts mating—you know cubs are coming. There’s a lot of anticipation and investment in understanding what she’s doing.
A lot of this work is a waiting game. Leopards are notoriously difficult to work with. But as soon as you start to understand a leopard truly, it opens up an entirely new world.

If you don’t know a leopard, you’d be lucky to find them even once. But when you’ve spent the time and you know their patterns, it becomes possible to find them again and again.
If a leopard doesn’t want to be seen, she won’t be. That’s it. But if you’ve built trust—if you’ve worked respectfully—then she allows you in.

And as that trust builds, the layers start peeling back, and it becomes easier to find and work with them. That just takes time, respect, and consistent behavior.

There was a scene where the father left food for his son instead of chasing him away—it was breathtaking. I couldn’t predict that. Was it the same for you? Was it surprising, or did you expect it?

It was very surprising. Traditionally, the biggest killers of leopards are other leopards. Especially males killing the young. A lot of that comes down to uncertainty. Male leopards aren’t always sure which cubs are theirs. If you have high leopard density and a lot of male traffic, then males can never be completely certain the cubs are their offspring. So they kill them. It’s a way of removing competition and pushing females into estrus again.

But in the case of Mokhanyu—what we call “the mock male”—he was very established, very comfortable, and he had a firm grip on his territory. He knew that the cubs were his.
So we saw multiple interactions where he not only tolerated them but actually engaged with them. Even when the cubs were a little older, he was secure enough to know they were his and acted accordingly.

When we saw him leaving food for the young male, that was a real sign of just how confident and secure he was in his territory. I’ve seen it once before, where a male acted like that. But 99% of the time, male–cub interactions end badly. They usually result in fatalities.

And, Mokhanyu was like a teddy bear. Honestly, he was one of the gentlest, nicest males I’ve ever seen.

He would come across other females, and instead of aggression, he would just sit quietly. He wasn’t a fighter, not unless he had to be. He once had a fight with another male who came in. And when he needed to fight, he did. He survived. He won.

But generally, he was a gentle, ambivalent, and decent individual. Such a great character. Still one of the nicest males I’ve worked with.
When that interaction happened—between him and his son—we were really worried. We had invested so much time into Mochima and her cubs. That could have been the end of the story. But he pulled through for us.

And it also speaks volumes about how experienced and capable Mochima was. She had two cubs survive, which is rare. Leopard cub mortality is very high. Less than 50% make it. Most die because of other leopards. She was an unbelievable mother.

So yes, it was a risk. I’d always wanted to do a biographical story that followed cubs from birth to independence. But it’s a hell of a risk. The survival rate is low. You need the right individuals and the right dynamic.

That scene when the cubs left the territory was so emotional. What was it like for you as a storyteller and observer?

You know, in the back of your mind, you know it’s coming. You can prepare yourself as much as you want, but it still hits you.
It’s like when a parent passes away. You know it’s going to happen one day, but you’re never truly ready.

When Mochima confronted her daughter, and they had that proper fight at the territorial boundary, that’s when it hit us. This is it. It’s happening.

And it was emotional. The daughter had so much admiration and love for her mother, and now she was being pushed out.

We loved Kutjira and Dakunga (cubs) so much. We had invested so much in them. They had such charisma. And Mochima (mom) was the foundation of everything.

So seeing them leave was incredibly emotional. You have so much empathy for them. You know what lies ahead. Dakunga would enter the male world, full of fighting and survival. He’d get beaten up—again and again—until he figured it out.

And Kutjira would have to carve out her own space, confront other females, and fight for her territory. It’s a whole new level of struggle.

But at the same time, it was beautiful. They made it that far. They were truly going out on their own.

It’s just like kids leaving home. My son is turning 21 now, and I feel the same. You want to protect them, but you can’t. They have to go. They have to do it on their own.
So yes, it was a deeply emotional journey. Goodbyes are never easy; especially with beings you’ve spent years with.

And the weird thing is, when Dakunga left, we never saw him again. He went nomadic. A few years passed, and we still haven’t seen him. Not even once. And you always wonder, what’s he doing now? Where is he?

Kutjira, we saw her briefly near the edge of her mother’s territory. But then the floods came, and we were cut off. When the water finally dropped, we never saw her again.
So they’re out there somewhere. We have ID documents for all of them, based on whisker patterns. And every now and then, a female leopard shows up, and we check the documents. Could it be her? We always ask. We always hope. But so far, it hasn’t been.

“You can have the best gear in the world, but if you can’t tell a story, it’s pointless. So I always tell them to put the technology aside, make it an extension of your arm, and focus on storytelling. That’s what we do. We are storytellers.” – Brad Bestelink.

What was it like when Kutjira came back and sat on that tree, when you saw she had inherited her mother’s skill?

It was like being a proud parent. When we first picked her up again, we couldn’t believe it. The minute we saw her, we knew it was her. The crew was scattered; some guys were in camp, taking time off, and everyone just dropped everything.

They all said, “I’m going out. I’m going out, she’s there!” And we all descended to come and see her. It was incredible.
Literally, people left their rooms and rushed out just to be present for that moment. Everyone was so emotionally invested in her story. It was probably one of the biggest moments we’ve had.

After going through the heartbreak of watching her leave, knowing she had to go and face her own world, and then suddenly she returns, it was overwhelming.
It was a mix of sadness, joy, pride, and everything.

And the way she came back. Sitting on the tree, confident, hunting, inheriting her mother’s intelligence, and it was confirmation of everything we’d hoped for.
You captured that moment so beautifully. As a storyteller, how do you approach such emotional narratives with authenticity?

We just love our animals. That’s the truth. We try our best to impart that connection through the screen. We share the fascination, the respect, the love we feel for them. It becomes deeply personal.

And as a storyteller, you know this yourself; the best stories are the ones that are genuinely emotional, the ones that matter to you.

You can only tell powerful stories if you’re truly involved in them. If it’s real for you, it will be real for others. That’s what I believe. If you’re not genuinely involved, then why tell the story at all?

“There isn’t enough kindness in the world. There isn’t enough genuine art or honest storytelling. But if we foster it, if we build those spaces, it makes a difference.” – Brad Bestelink.

Has technology changed the way you tell stories? Is there anything you miss about the old-school style of wildlife filmmaking?

I think our documentaries actually lean more toward the old style of filmmaking. I do love technology. I love seeing what’s out there, and I make sure we’re equipped with the best gear that’s available. But at the end of the day, it’s all just tools.

It’s a visual language. But stories are personal. The story is everything. I’m not going to compromise a story for the sake of technology, and I’m not going to use technology to create a story that isn’t there.

We’ve got all the tools—gimbals, drones, high-end cameras—but I tell my crew, especially the younger ones, that these are just tools. Some of them get excited and say, “This camera is great, this lens is amazing,” and I say, “Sure, but can you tell a story?”

You can have the best gear in the world, but if you can’t tell a story, it’s pointless. So I always tell them to put the technology aside, make it an extension of your arm, and focus on storytelling. That’s what we do. We are storytellers.

So yes, I love the tools. We have good equipment. But ultimately, if you can’t tell a story, none of it matters. Without a story, you have nothing.

What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned from leopards as a filmmaker?

Leopards are my favorite cats—my favorite animals to film and work with.

What I admire most about them is their sense of innocence. Everything they do is functional. There’s no manipulation, no second-guessing. They don’t kill for sport. They kill because they need to. Every action they take is deliberate, practical, and honest. And I find that incredibly grounding.

People, on the other hand, play games. There’s posturing, manipulation, and agendas. But with leopards, everything is clear. There’s no malice in their actions. They do what they must to survive, and that’s it.

And I try to bring that mindset into my own life. I try not to assume malice in others. I try to approach things with goodwill until I’m proven wrong. That’s something I’ve learned from being around leopards.

There’s a purity in their actions. Their relationship with the environment is built on understanding and respect. I try to do that too. To observe more, pick up on nuance, learn from the surroundings before reacting.

You don’t have to act on everything. Just be aware, be present, be kind, and understand that your actions come with responsibility. So yes, the biggest lesson is about simplicity, honesty, and respect. The world gets cluttered with too much second-guessing. But if you believe in the good, stay in the moment, and act with pure intent, it becomes easier to live well. And that’s something I owe to leopards.

What is your next project?

Right now, we’re working on Big Cat, a BBC series where our crews are following different individual predators. I’ve been retracting from that a little bit because, well, there’s another leopard film in the making. I’ve been doing this for 20 to 25 years. We’ve made around 45 hours of our own independent films, aside from the bigger international projects. And I’ve come to a point where I feel I need to raise a stronger conservation voice.

It’s not just about getting people to fall in love with animals anymore. It’s about pushing the message.

The problem is, broadcasters don’t always want that. So we’re looking at different funding models now like philanthropic investment, foundations, and people who want to support films with stronger conservation messages.

These are passion projects. They’re not designed for commercial TV. Sure, they’ll be released, but the goal is deeper: to communicate what needs to be said. I’m being more selective about what I do now. I want to work on projects that are good for my heart and align with my values. Less commercial. More personal. That’s the direction I’m heading in.

Any final thoughts for readers, storytellers, or future visitors?

You know, I think interviews like this—conversations that are open, kind, and genuine—are a sign that we’re doing something right.

If someone watches Living with Leopards and resonates emotionally, feels the depth of what we’re trying to share, that means the story worked.
Be kind. Have empathy. Be creative. Share that with the world. People respond to it.

There isn’t enough kindness in the world. There isn’t enough genuine art or honest storytelling. But if we foster it, and if we build those spaces, it makes a difference.

Cover: Image courtesy of Brad Bestelink. 

Read more from Maryam Tahmasebi in The Game Magazine:

Filmmaking Beyond Borders: Andrea Segre on Cinema, Archives, and Where Documentary Meets Fiction