Stroop (2018) Review — Journey into the Rhino Horn War Documentary

Watching Stroop Before I Made Rhino Man

By John Jurko II, director of the documentary Rhino Man.

I first watched Stroop: Journey into the Rhino Horn War in 2018, right around the time I was getting seriously involved with what would eventually become Rhino Man. Bonné de Bod and Susan Scott’s film landed in my world at exactly the right moment. I went into our filmmaking process with their work as part of my education, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

A lot of people who care about rhinos ask me what other documentaries they should watch. Stroop is almost always near the top of my list. It is, in many ways, still the most complete map of the rhino horn war that anyone has put on screen.

This is my honest reflection on the film, what it taught me as a filmmaker entering this space, and how it shaped some of the choices we ended up making on Rhino Man.

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What Stroop Does and Does Comprehensively

The first thing to understand about Stroop is the ambition of what Susan and Bonné set out to do. Most documentaries about rhino poaching stop where the helicopter lifts off and the carcass cools on the ground. Stroop doesn’t stop. They followed the horn.

They embedded with rangers on the front lines in Kruger and the private reserves. They sat in courtrooms. They visited rhino orphanages and the people raising calves whose mothers had been killed in front of them. They went to Vietnam and China and got undercover footage of the markets and apartments where horn gets sold as a hangover cure, a status symbol, a false cancer treatment. They covered the criminal justice system, the private rhino owners, the rehabilitators, the activists, the consumers.

That’s an enormous amount of ground for one film to hold. And it costs you years to do it. What started as a six-month project became a four-year filming odyssey. Both filmmakers left their jobs, sold their homes, and moved back in with their mothers to finish it. That kind of commitment doesn’t come from a grant cycle — it comes from deciding the story matters more than your own stability.

When I watched Stroop in 2018, what struck me was how much of the landscape it gave you. Not the visual landscape — the situational one. The economic flows, the criminal networks, the legal gaps, the cultural beliefs across continents that keep the demand alive. As someone about to spend years filming this world, it was the kind of grounding I needed. I came out of STROOP with a much clearer sense of what we were actually dealing with.

That breadth is also why Stroop has aged well. The film is over seven years old now and it is still the documentary I point people to when they want to understand the whole shape of the war. The numbers have shifted. The networks have evolved. But the architecture Stroop exposed is still recognizably the architecture today.

Promotional still from Stroop (2025), Copyright Susan Scott.

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How Watching It Shaped Some of Our Choices on Rhino Man

Here’s the part I think about most.

When you watch a film as comprehensive as Stroop, you have a choice to make as a filmmaker entering the same subject. You can try to do what they did — cover the whole system, follow the trade end to end. Or you can do the opposite. You can choose to stay very close to one corner of it and try to go deeper there than anyone else has.

We chose the second path on Rhino Man. We chose to stay with the rangers.

We didn’t try to follow the horn to Vietnam. We didn’t sit in courtrooms or interview prosecutors. We didn’t go undercover. We did one thing, and we tried to do it well: live alongside a handful of rangers in South Africa long enough that their lives became the film. The relationships, the families, the fears, the funerals.

That choice was clarified for me partly because of films like Stroop. They had already gone wide. They had already mapped the system. What I felt was missing — and what I had access to, given the relationships our team had on the ground — was the slower, more intimate human story underneath that map. The decade of a ranger’s life. The wife at home who learned to live with the not-knowing. The friend, mentor, and father figure who would eventually be assassinated.

If Stroop gives you the whole architecture of the war, I wanted Rhino Man to give you one of the rooms inside it, lit very carefully, lived in for a long time.

That isn’t a critique of Stroop. It is the opposite. Their choice to go wide made room for films like ours to go narrow. The conservation world needs both kinds of films, and I don’t think the intimate version of this story would have hit the same way without the comprehensive version already existing.

Promotional still from Stroop (2025), Copyright Susan Scott.

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Why Stroop Still Belongs at the Top of the Conservation Film Canon

Seven years on, the rhino poaching crisis has not gone away. South Africa lost 499 rhinos in 2023. The rangers I know are still out there. The trade has adapted, the demand has not collapsed, and the criminal economy is still running.

Stroop remains essential viewing for anyone who wants to understand why the war hasn’t ended. If you’re an educator, an NGO program officer, a corporate sustainability lead, or a student trying to understand wildlife trafficking, this is the film I’d recommend first. Pair it with one of the more intimate ranger-focused films — Virunga, Akashinga, or yes, Rhino Man — and you have something close to the full picture.

It’s also a quiet model of what’s possible when two independent filmmakers refuse to walk away from a story. Susan and Bonné did it without a major broadcaster or streamer behind them. They made the film they needed to make, and the world is better for it.

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Where to Watch Stroop

Stroop: Journey into the Rhino Horn War is available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video, and other digital platforms. It has been broadcast in nearly 100 countries since its release, so availability may vary by region — check your preferred service.

You can learn more about Susan and Bonné’s continuing work at sdbfilms.com.

Promotional still from Stroop (2025), Copyright Susan Scott.

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A Companion, Not a Comparison

Stroop and Rhino Man are not the same film, and they were never trying to be. Susan and Bonné gave us the whole crime. We tried to give you a few of the people inside it.

If Stroop helped you understand the scale and system of what’s happening to rhinos, I’d gently invite you to spend time with Rhino Man and meet a few of the people standing inside that system. Anton Mzimba was not a statistic. He was the Head of Ranger Services at Timbavati Private Nature Reserve. He was a husband, a father, and a friend. He was assassinated in July 2022 while our film was still being finished.

That is the part of this war that even the very best wide-lens films can never fully hold. It needs its own film. It needed years of trust. It needed the choice to stay close, even when the story was bigger somewhere else.

Both films serve the same fight. Watch Stroop for the world. Watch Rhino Man for one of the lives inside it.

Rhino Man is now available for rental and purchase on Apple, Amazon, Google Play, and Vimeo.

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